Yo! It's your resident asshole on the blogski this week. For those of you who have read my prior blogs, you should know that I try to refer to myself as an asshole at least one time per blog, preferably two on a good day. Mission accomplished in the first sentence this week! I’m only half joking most of the time but this week I have yet another example of why my parent of the year award has been placed on perma-hold. John and I decided that we are moving…once again. After 1 year of my commuting 2.5 hours to work for the military and spending three nights away per week from my kids, in a time span of all but 30 minutes, John and I, the brilliant masterminds that we are, finally came to the conclusion that our only option was to move our family closer to my work. In order to make the situation work for the past year, we had concocted a spider web of life lines that kept our family semi-functional. All of this changed after I returned from Fort Polk, Louisiana. A couple of the tethers that we had spun snapped or weakened and, without getting into specifics, our whole delicate web that was sustaining us seemingly imploded. So there it was. The decision was easy at that point as it was the only option we had left.
I’m deliriously happy about this decision as the driving and being away from my kids was taking its toll on my physically and mentally. I’d like to think lesser women, but probably smarter and happier women, would have put their foot down a long time ago. But we wanted to give our kids security, we wanted Trev to stay at the same school, and quite frankly I burned all of my goodwill I had with John on the prior move from eastern Iowa to Nebraska (more on that later). So I have been living somewhat of a nightmare for the past year. At the time I was going through it, it made perfect sense to me. I didn’t want to be the nagging wife, I didn’t want to uproot my kids (again), I didn’t want the burdens associated with moving, etc. I justified it in all sorts of ways and I put all the pressure on myself to make this shit work because of the guilt associated with moving my family three times in a relatively short time period. So, I did what needed to be done. Suck it up and drive on, I would tell myself as I got up at 4 a.m. to drive to work. It wasn’t sustainable, I recognize that now. It wasn’t a question of if we would move again, but rather, when. Now that I see we have been on this path the entire time, driving to work has become nearly unbearable. But by trying to avoid the inevitable, to do the “right” thing, the ridiculous part is that I made a mess and created more chaos. Now, Trevor has to switch schools mid-year. We are putting our house on the market in the slow season. We are leaving a community that I had grown to like. We haven’t owned our house long enough to justify a sale. One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.
All of this, unfortunately, is old hat to us. This will be the third house we have sold since I returned from Afghanistan in 2011. That’s even worse than I thought. Writing that out stings. Three houses, five years. Ouch. Each time, though, I have learned an important lesson. For example, our first house in Sioux City was in a terrible location, a rougher and older part of town. At one point, we lived next to a crazy scrapper who was married for three days before he left his wife to return to scrapping, a drug dealer and a former El Forastero motorcycle gang member. After I returned from Afghanistan, I found a new job, wanted to start over and so we moved. We lost big on that house. We had purchased it before the market crash of 2008 and the market in Sioux City hadn’t improved much in 2011. I can still remember seeing the closing documents with a big old negative in the Seller’s column. I learned that location is everything. If you have a diamond in the rough, when it comes to real estate, the rough diminishes the diamond substantially.
Next, we moved to a better location in eastern Iowa but made the mistake of buying a two-story house that was dated. When I found my "dream" job prosecuting sex crimes (or so I thought) we sold again so we could move to Nebraska. Chance of a lifetime I told John. He didn't want to move. I did. He moved for a dream that never would be realized by me but he believed in me enough to try. I can still smell the ashes of my goodwill burning as a result. During this sale, I discovered John and I have shitty taste. No one seemed to like what we did to the house. We finished the basement and made the floor look like marble. People wanted carpet. We painted the basement gray as it was supposed to be the new beige per HGTV but it turns out people still wanted beige. And a two-story? Well, everyone wanted a ranch house. We put a lot of money into making the garage a man cage with epoxy floors and a work station in order to appeal to male buyers, also a tip I took off of HGTV. We didn’t get the money back out of that endeavor either. Man caves are nice but they don’t increase the value of the home that much. We lost money on that sale as well but not as much as we lost when we left Sioux City so that was a huge plus relatively speaking.
We purchased the home that we are in now in a small community outside of Omaha. We planned on living there until the kids were out of school. But my dream job turned into a nightmare and never blossomed into what I had hoped and prayed for. I had prayed to God to get the job and then found myself praying to leave. Then, all of a sudden, the military was unexpectedly looking for a lawyer 2.5 hours away from where we lived. I never thought I would work for the military full-time again after Afghanistan. But, here I am. The only illusion is that we are in control I guess.
So, once again we have done work to the house that I suspect will not meet everyone’s liking (like the fact our garage is bigger than our home). But I am growing to accept the process of change. I am trying to figure my life out, sort through some things and do right by my kids. It’s a tough balancing act and I make mistakes, for sure. I regret the small fortune we lose every time we move but especially the guilt that comes with uprooting my two children and ripping my husband out of his career as well. It's no wonder people are surprised that I'm married. It takes a unique person to put up with my brand of bull shit. Regardless, though, I’m confident we will come out on the other side. I guess that is what Afghanistan has done for me—taught me that no matter what, I can come out on the other side of most things. I also know and stand firm in believing that I can make more money and that my children will learn to be resilient assholes, just like their mother through all of this transition (which is the PC way of referring to ripping your children from their home). All joking aside, perhaps they will also learn that change, even though it is hard, is always good as long you as simply keep moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other even when it is difficult. Maybe they will learn to appreciate adversity because it can be the greatest teacher. Perhaps they won’t be stymied by fear of failure or looking stupid because they have seen their good ole’ mom fail and look stupid and get up and try again. In the end, I have to believe that my kids, although they will likely require psychotherapy at some point, will also understand that the only way not to make mistakes is to do nothing and that is, paradoxically, the biggest mistake of all.
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