About two months ago, we decided to try our luck at this dismal economy & put our house on the market. No real pressure, but just to see if it would sell so that we could move in closer to our jobs & therefore steal back another hour & a half out of our day from our hellish commute.
Side Note: If you’re looking at real estate & you can buy a jacked up older home close to work or a bigger, pretty house out in the country for less than the city house…BUY THE CITY HOUSE. No, seriously. No house is worth sitting in traffic for an hour twice a day.
Anyway. When we first put the house on the market,I was that obnoxious Type-A seller who’s head exploded every time her email “dinged” at her. A showing! ::head explodes:: Feedback! ::head explodes:: Nothing was safe from my brain matter. & I was a stickler for a clean house – the floors must be lickable, the high chair properly Cloroxed, the sheets in hospital-mode. Because DUH, nobody would buy our house if they saw a dust bunny! Right?!?! Until a month passed. & then another month. & as my email kept dinging at me, life kept trucking along & I realized some very key life lessons through this journey through real estate in our downtrodden economy:
I cannot be everywhere at once. I can’t be in my office, cleaning up my home, running errands, & entertaining my child at the same time. When I try to be everything & everywhere, I usually end up drooling in a bathtub by Friday night, begging Nate for a glass of wine & a lobotomy.
I cannot do every thing & do everything well. It’s simply impossible & something has to give. I can’t be present with my son & still be cleaning constantly. If I’m busy folding laundry, it might mean that I’m missing bath time. & I can’t be sitting in my office chair doing paperwork without mistakes with my mind drifting to my cleaning schedule or fretting over a speck of dirt the buyers might see. Multi-tasking has it’s limits – I can clean the house while watching the baby, or blog while sitting next to Nate, but at the end of the day, I haven’t done either thing entirely well because nothing received my undivided attention. & that’s not fair to any aspect of my life.
I have to PRIORITIZE. There are certain things that life requires of me. Be a mother, a wife, work outside the home. I must juggle those three balls & there is no point in resisting. But I can prioritize the “extras” – the house being on the market, the blog, exercise. After work, Harrison & Nate come first. Is Harrison in bed? Is there dinner? Good. Then to clean up – do I need to do laundry tonight, or can it wait? Do the floors need to be mopped? No? Then I can sit down. & blog or Tweet or do whatever mind-numbing internet activity helps me “relax” that night.
Because sometimes, clean enough is enough. My house is a home. It’s not a monument or a museum or a hospital. It’s a home where we laugh & play & cook & make mistakes. There will be dust bunnies because my priorities lie with my family & work, not the future buyers of my home. There will be a constant pile of laundry because I choose to be present during bath time. There will always be garden beds that need to be weeded because I choose to take time for myself to write, think, & drink tea each night. & there might be an overflowing washer & a tea cup on my desk when a potential buyer walks through, but I was on time to my 8am meeting. But as long as my house isn’t a breeding orgy for cockroaches & my kid doesn’t come off the floor with dirt-crusted knees, we’re golden.
& more importantly, sometimes enough is enough. I’m learning when to call “uncle.” Call uncle? Shit. I’m learning when to SCREAM UNCLE! That after a 5am wake-up call, smushed banana on suit blazer, & one more potential buyer claiming that they don’t like where our kitchen table is positioned (herro? not coming with the house, dumbass!), that I simply cannot write a legal contract on my own. CANNOT. So I cry uncle & ask for help. Or when I simply can’t get Thankful on Thursday written for the second week in a row – UNCLE. It doesn’t get written. Or that three of our October weekends are already booked, barelling us straight into the holidays – UNCLE. Our house goes off the market on September 1st, with plans to try again in the spring.
It’s not easy. Especially when you’re a control freak that sports the Letter A for Type A, not Adultery. Last night, we had friends over for dinner – & I gave in to let someone else make dessert. I wanted sweet potato fries instead of a freshly mopped floor. The bathroom needed to be scrubbed down, so I didn’t get a shower before guests arrived. & we drank beer out of bottles, not our beer steins because I simply could not locate them. But we still had fun, there were still plenty of laughs, & nobody mentioned that my beer cheese dip wasn’t garnished or displayed in anything more than a simple white bowl.
I’m slowly learning to let go, let it be, & I think I’ll be happier in the long run.
Just don’t mention my dust bunnies or the shoes in the corner when you come over, okay?
