The Game Changer: Part 2 of a 6 part series

 

“Amityville Horror”

(if you've just joined us,  here's part 1 to start you off)... http://freddiesmom50x50.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-game-changer-part-1-of-6-part-series.html

The first step was to look at all the unfinished projects and repairs, and figure out where to start. Like the loose granite tile at the edge of our kitchen counter, being wedged in place with packaging tape.  We have 100 things like that, unfinished or stuck together with gum, just to get us through the Era Of Little Kids, even though we are now in the Era Of The Bigger Kids.

Then, we also had to simultaneously declutter.  Now, I like my stuff and it all has a home.  But I have too much still.  I declutter often and have been using the test of:

#1) Do I like it? 

#2) Do I use it?

If something passed both tests, it lives here.  I thought I had been doing a pretty good job.  But I found when I applied the third criteria of:

#3) But would I MOVE it to the new house?

Suddenly, not everything passed the test. And as my friend mentioned, when you throw in the last, little known criteria of:

#4) Would I want my kids to deal with this if I died?  or worse yet, DISCOVER IT?

-----Well, watch the pile of keepers deflate like a weak soufflé.  

So we made a plan to declutter and fix a little bit every day, a few things here and there, while still having our frolicking summer like fluffy lambs scampering in the field.

We informed our house we were going to mess with it and as if by saying it out loud, a war started.  Thus entered Turmoil, Pain, and Downward Spiral; the likes of which I have never seen before.

The first thing that unraveled, was our clothes dryer.  It was a little slow, limping along but still working.  We were in good spirits and so when my husband would throw the towels in, I’d say,

“How long did you set the timer for?”

and he’d say,

“I set it to ‘Wednesday.’ ”

This was funny, because it was only Saturday.  Four days to dry towels!  Freaking hilarious.  We were at the top of our game, summer was running smoothly, and hey, a dryer problem is easy.  Laundromats or a clothesline…we had our options.  We rolled our eyes and laughed like game show hosts at the pretend trauma, all the while knowing how blessed we were to have a life where our biggest complaint was about a dryer.  We were fresh horses and I was in a good mood because I was going to get my dream house soon.

But 24 hours later, the dam broke. Within a ten day period, the following things malfunctioned or died in unexplainable and mysterious ways:

• Flies, Amityville Horror Swarms of them, suddenly appeared in our garage, drunken and lazy, hanging out on the lights.  I’d kill twenty who didn’t even try to save their lives.  Then another battalion would enter from the portal of Hell somewhere beneath my dryer.
• Our airline tickets were rearranged by the airlines, with all the wrong times.
• The microwave, calculator, my cell phone and the house phone all stopped working and then mysteriously worked again.
• My plum bread (5 stars on Epicurous.com!!) flipped me off and went concave on me in the oven, like a woman’s breasts in her 80’s. 
• Our one credit card account closed out of the blue.  For no real reason.  The branch manager still doesn’t know why.
• My blog password stopped working.
• Our lawn mower had a coronary.
• But not before vomiting all its gasoline onto the concrete of our new patio. 
• Vacation pictures were corrupted after uploading perfectly.
• Our Subaru broke twice…during its three weeks IN the repair shop.
• My camera stopped uploading to the computer,
• Then the battery died and the charger had gum all over it.
• Raccoons decided to live in our trash cans on Mondays and Wednesdays at midnight.  And all the other nights.
• Our other email address stopped working.
• The coffee maker I won on eBay was suddenly recalled, despite hours of research saying it’s the rock star of coffee makers.  I don’t ask for much…I only wanted a better coffee maker for brewing Thunderbolt Turbo-Roast.  So I could work harder than I already do, says she, sarcastically.

Let’s just say if you drew a Feng Shui bagua over our house, we would be located at the left corner of the Doomsday Triangle.

But, as always, we turn to Lily Tomlin for encouragement:  “Things will get a lot worse before they get worse.”

And they did!

• A rash suddenly appeared on the back of both my legs.  Badly, like werewolf welts or tunneling beetles.
• Our last remaining email crashed….HARD.
• The wiring shorted out in our garage, and we had to hire an emergency electrician to rewire it immediately, or else we’d burn in our beds.
• Our mandated internet upgrade caused it to be down for 80 hours.  I’d like to give a shout out to AT&T for that one.
• Our ‘low tire’ light came on in my van, showing the driver side tire was low on air.  Trust me, this is NOT the news a woman wants to hear in the middle of her weight loss journey.
• Our cat bit me.  Her rabies booster was a few months overdue, so she and I had to be quarantined at the Big House for five days.  I’m just kidding about me, although seclusion in a rabies unit may have given me some well needed “Me” time.

In the midst of this crisis, I threw a birthday party for my eight-year-old.  Because we are involved parents just like the evil experts tell us we need to be, we have many baskets and piles of all the volunteer tasks and home projects and activities we have taken on.  So, on Party Friday, we spent Black Thursday removing evidence of having a life.  We moved baskets and piles and containers from everywhere in our house, and stacked them on our bed, so as to free up social areas in the other rooms.  On that day, our house felt especially cramped. My elbows hit everything as I went back and forth.  My pant loop caught on drawer handles and I started hating, despising, wishing my own home dead. 

To add to the downward spiral, we had several family visits and a few social encounters during that time. Suddenly it hit me squarely between the eyes….all these people are keeping in touch with each other; their photos show strong and deep relationships, but I am on the fringe, because I am so busy.  Busy doing what?  Normal stuff, busy with the lives of my family but with the added nonsense of retracing steps, moving and re-moving project piles, holding onto the old way of doing things, not evolving…I see how it has taken its toll.  It has affected the time I spend with those I love.  

In the meantime, Primrose Lane was still hovering in escrow and hadn’t fallen into my hands yet.  I still kept the dream alive.  

I know there is a fine line between faith and delusion.  My husband agreed, and said, “Yes, and you’ve crossed it. Quite nicely.”  He noticed as I seared my vision through the time/space continuum, through my bank account and then figuratively lifted my leg on the house, carved my initials in it and branded my name on its backside.  Maybe I just misunderstood the concept, but I call that Visualization.  If it’s called Hallucination or Stalking, then so be it.  It’s the only way I know how to claim a dream.

At last, every single thing in our house broke, except for my spirit and my heart.  I kept in mind that our family was healthy and we had a home and a job, blah blah blah, but after ten solid days of cataclysmic breakage and feeling generally screwed by the universe prank machine, I thought we had hit the worst.

Then I heard the news that escrow closed and I lost Primrose Lane for the fourth time. 

My spirit and heart, already living on a thin thread, finally broke.

And this is where I imploded, just like my house. This is where I hit the all-time lowest of low.  Normally I am good at keeping things in perspective, but not the case at that moment. 

I needed to find where glow sticks go when they are spent, and then throw myself on the big pile of snuffed out light.  

(click for Part 3 of 6: http://freddiesmom50x50.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-game-changer-part-3-of-6-part-series.html   )