musings on renovation

the dining room floor after we pulled up the fake wood vinyl

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack...

-- Talking Heads

I really want to write to my children. I want to write them letters and tell them how much they mean to me and who they were when they were tiny and who I was when they were tiny and who we grew into together.

When Isaac was a newborn I took a special little journal of handcrafted paper and carefully began an entry or two to this little being I barely knew.

Very quickly it became clear what was unclear – At what aged Isaac was I directing this writing? What kind of language made sense? Is he reading this as a 10-year-old? An adult? Other?

Then, very quickly after that it became clear that I could not keep up a journal to my newborn because I had a newborn.

When Obama was elected, I started another letter to Isaac. He was three then. I got farther with it, but it's still not finished.

I think it's a bit like our contractor who has never finished the renovation on his own house.

Yes, we have a contractor. We are moving ahead with putting a bathroom upstairs and creating a bedroom out of the store room. Why, Kitty, where will you store things? Meeee?? What on earth might I want to store? Everything is out in the open here, baby. Closets are for wusses; attics are for sissies; store rooms are for the weak and foolish!

The plumber is coming tomorrow. This may not sound like a threat to you, but when spoken to us by our contractor, it most certainly was. He was trying to get us to go choose the crap we want in the bathroom, and well, as you may have gathered from previous entries, we are stretched somewhat thin and this choosing activity has not been at the top of our to-do list.

And here is where we return to the idea of writing, sort of. Picking out fixtures is a bit like choosing a font – You can look at a whole alphabet/style line together and decide on the style that suits you – Serifs? Sans serifs? Square head faucets? Bold hardware? Italic? Condensed? Brushed nickel finish? You may like the main line, but then you see the F or the towel rack and you think, “No! No! No! That won't do! Why's that swirly thing swirling there?”

And while you are still caught in the showroom delirium wondering how and why anyone would bother to spend two hours doing this and screw it let's just go to a store and buy our own damn towel rack that's in stock and a helluva lot cheaper even if the contractor won't guarantee it for a year like he will if we spend 5x as much on it, and you suddenly have this revelation that will change your life forever: OMG. I now understand why Home Depot exists and maybe it's a good thing that it does. It was like when I learned that only the female mosquito bites, the males – wait for it – pollinate flowers.

The only person who was probably less excited than we were today about picking out shower valves and vent fans was our contractor who was calling messages in to the plumbing show room from his long weekend camping in the Berkshires. (Another path I wonder about – one minute you decide to go to school for architectural design because you like lines and you can visualize space well and the next you are talking to people about where the toilet paper holder should go...)

And you may find yourself using the word sconces more than you ever thought possible. Yet, it's a good word. A good word. Maybe even making my top 100 list. And here, again, is where we return to the idea of writing. Because, in fact, we always return to the idea of writing. What a relief.

dining room floor refinished

feminism never accounted for homeownership

I recently walked down into the basement of our house for the first time since we bought it. Like most of what motivates me to attempt anything beyond sleep these days, it had to do with the baby. I needed to tell the guys installing insulation in our breezeway of a house that there was a baby asleep above them. I wanted to sound friendly in a threatening kind of way. It's an art.

For their part, two of the men were trying to convince the third, apparently a transplant from Puerto Rico, that it “wasn't that cold” on this particular day. I would have stayed to side with my compañero, but I don't linger in the basement of our house. The last time I spent any time in my little field stone salon was before I'd signed on the bottom line, when the house inspector was here taking notes on the boiler and shaking his head.

I left that meeting no more the wiser about boilers or anything else down there or in the rest of the house, for that matter. In short, I can't keep up. I have no idea why we need a roof vent or what the chimney in the storage room has to do with the water heater or whether or not our siding is grounded. Where Mike nodded authoritatively at the inspector's assessments of everything from the circuit breakers to the door locks, I tagged along behind occasionally saying things like “Could you repeat that?” as if I'd figure it out if I heard it again.

When Mike headed for the basement door the other day after the tub wouldn't drain mumbling something about “the trap,” I had a vague notion of what he meant, but well, not really, and certainly not enough to go into the basement and find this trap thing, just enough to know it was a crummy job and I was glad I wasn't doing it. I leaned in to him and hooked my arm in his. “Oh, honey! I crooned with mock glee bending one leg at the knee, “We're homeowners!!”

I feel like buying a house has been a major assault to my feminist identity, on the off-chance that any of it was left in the first place. Mike plans projects like installing ceiling fans and dimmer switches while I think about table runners. When I question whether he might electrocute himself while ticking off his to do list, he offers reassurances that only reinforce the divide between us.

“I took classes in electricity stuff in high school,” he shrugs, the confidence pooling at the corners of his mouth like cookie crumbs.

I look over at my husband and blink methodically. “I took Home Ec. where I learned how to sew a bean bag frog. I'm so glad we were equally prepared for the world.” And here I was thinking I'd been super lucky – the semester after ours the class had gotten into a huge rice fight and from then on everyone had to stuff their frogs with boring soft filling.

We never had to carry eggs around to warn us away from parenting, like in some schools, but no egg could have prepared me for the social train wreck that follows giving birth in this country. Since I will never ever learn, Rhys and I stopped in to a couple of parents' groups this past week. At one, where kids of different ages mingled in two huge rooms of complete chaos, a leader gushed to me about how many places you could put your baby down here. Yeah, I thought, if you want him to get a fungus. Another mom revealed to me in casual conversation that she started coming for what she referred to as her “sanity.” Toddlers on tricycles zoomed by us in some kind of pre-school rush hour, somewhere in the distance children were fighting over doll blankets. “I'm not sure this is sanity,” I responded, causing her to curl her lip every so slightly.

At another circle, we were meant to talk about the question of “identity” and what may have happened to ours since having kids. When it's my turn, my five-month-old is cranky and tired, refusing the boob I'm pushing into his face as I'm passed the “talking stone.” Over his crying I blurt out a few bitter-sounding things about the hospital and the snow. “May I offer a brief the reflection?” the overcareful, over-educated facilitator asks me when I'm done. “No,” I tell her and pack my things to go.

Can I tell you that Isaac is currently studying gender bias, by the way? First grade. I can only imagine what I was studying in the first grade. Jump rope songs and choosing games, I think. My mother and your mother were hanging up the clothes. My mother socked your mother right smack in the nose. What color was the blood? Green. G-R-E-E-N. You're it! I wonder if studying something changes it. Or are we all just trapped in a fish tank – blue fins fiddling with gears, pink fins applying lipstick – to be watched with interest by our children?

memoir titles

Trying to come up with titles for a memoir to cover this year. Here are a few contenders so far:

Chopping Vegetables on the Washing Machine: A Guide to Home Ownership

My Kid Might Be Allergic to Maple Syrup: How You Too Can Move to New England!

Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned on Craig's List

The Altar In Front of Children's Hospital Was Crowded, So I Threw Them the Bird Instead: When the Diagnosis is Positive

When I Tell You Where I Moved From, Do Not Say “WHY?!”: How To Miss Monterey in 5 Easy Steps Months

Blasting Begins 12/13. Please Expect Delays: Our Travels to Boston

Like Ripping Off A Bandaid: Snow in October and Other Ways to Get the Pain Out of the Way Quickly

My Home Inspector Quoted Rumi To Me: The Trials of a Poet Mama

When Roadtrips Go Bad: How to Fight in Front of Your Child While Eating at a Vinyl-Cushioned Booth in a Diner Somewhere in Pennsylvania

Mommy! The Cat Has More Playdates Than I Do! : Varnish and Varmints of a 110-year-old House

Happy New Year, All!

the door collector

Doors red, blue, brown, white standard sizes, white one skinny closet door. one blue with window and glass, I collect doors but can't take them! 10 each

That is an actual line from a Craig's List ad. The person was moving and listing a variety of things for sale. After the hand-painted boogie board and before the list of mirrors was this list. Doors.

Collecting doors? Maybe he or she didn't want to miss Opportunity. It might knock on the beige one with the half-circle of stained glass at the top. Or, it might favor the steel door, impenetrable though it may seem. The screen door, flapping gayly open and closed through summer nights might be where it comes to call, or the one painted white and red with the ornate handle.

The call and the challenge for the writer is to notice. Through this year of chaos, I try. Often anymore, it is the only thing I can do. I can't seem to do anything about things, either because they are out of my control to begin with or because I notice them while walking a fussy baby, or while falling into bed, exhausted.

Before I moved, I had started on a longer work, now temporarily abandoned, that deals with my mom's passing and my tendency to search for and, by turns, embrace or reject what might be signs of messages from the other side. One of the main things I am grappling with in writing it – or should I say grappling with and so writing it in hopes of at least (and this is no small part) laying bare the questions though the answers may never find me – is even if I were to find what I believe with all my being is a sign, so what? A sign of...? The meaning of which is...? Because of it I'm supposed to believe...?

That's where the noticing comes in. For now, I just notice. It is what it is, as they say. What to do with the information, I have no idea.

I just notice, for example, that my mother declined open heart surgery before she died. And that the last time I saw her was in a cardio ICU unit. I just notice that a year after her passing I had a baby that requires open heart surgery. And that I will be spending time with him in a cardio ICU unit.

I also notice that I have bought a house with a lot of issues regarding doors and passage ways. I refer to it regularly as a Feng Shui nightmare. None of the doors to the rooms close right, entrances are obstructed, unnecessarily complicated, blocked. If everything in the world wasn't at the top of my priority list right now, from buying winter boots to scheduling surgery, I'd say I'd have those doors fixed ASAP. My baby, born to this house in so many strange ways – born at home the night we moved in, his middle name meaning “new house...” -- has passages in his heart that are blocked and other spaces that are open where they aren't supposed to be. Just noticing.

I laughed and laughed at the door collector when I first hit upon it. But really, why should this hobby be any odder than any of our other neuroses? French doors teeming with possibility. Barn doors with their two halves swinging independently. We live among closet doors, pocket doors, solid wood doors with see-through key holes. All the while, looking for a way out

Excuse me, but did you just say the word 'casserole'?

blueberry muffins
homemade ketchup
homemade pesto
and the topper – a brown rice casserole.

This is the current list of things we've been greeted with my our new neighbors. We seem to have landed in some kind of wonderland of friendliness, not to mention, victory gardens.

Also worth noting is that we seem to be surrounded by Californians. The wives on both sides of us are California natives, the diaper service lady called Arcadia home before moving east, the mailman hails from Santa Rosa, the young couple running the groovy farm in the next town just moved out here the month before we did from Santa Barbara, the woman across the street lived several years in Palo Alto. Curious.

In my first couple weeks in the house, which of course were also my first couple weeks with a newborn, I have not been able to get out and about and meet these west coast transplants with good community habits. I am quite secluded in my tiny room filled with a collage of straws, washcloths, ibuprofen, pillows, and a squalling infant they say is mine. My sequestered existence only deepened when Little Guy, being pretty little, was not able to eat so very much, and I ended up with badly blocked milk ducts, near mastitis, that culminated in the precipice of delirium and a 103 fever on my birthday. (This child crowded into August, for goddsakes, when every other event in our lives happens. He knows how to find the party.)

Milk Duds? exclaimed Gerard.

Ducks! I shouted. Milk Ducks!

-- from Anagrams, by Lorrie Moore

When I complained I'd never get out to see anyone, that I felt like a ghost, here but not really here, Mike suggested putting on a long, black veil and walking slowly around the lighted porch at night, just to add to the mystery and mystique, charge up the rumor mill.

There are many, many things I have no memory of in my life. Many, many of those many, many things relate to the early days of being a mom. But there is one thing I remember with keen clarity. It took nine days for my nipples to stop being ripped apart and feeling like they were on fire. Nine. Not eight, not ten. This time was no different. Nine. Though there was a space in which I dreamed of a shorter penance.

I heard through the grapevine that my next door neighbor was a lactation consultant. She was also, as it turned out, on vacation. We waited in great anticipation for her to return.

When did my life turn into an Alanis Morissette song? I moved in next door to a lactation consultant...who was on vacation...in CALIFORNIA.

Obsessed with someone I never met, the days ticked on and my tender nipples scabbed. Until one day, Mike was looking out the kitchen window and, adding on Mike's inability to remember anyone's name, you get this conversation--

Mike: Hey! There's Tim...

Me: You mean Todd?

Mike: Todd is putting car seats in the car; maybe he's going to pick up his family...You should go over and ask him if Natalie...

Me: You mean Cynthia?

Mike: Cynthia's coming home today.

Me: 'Hi, Tim-Todd. I'm Kitty. Is your wife Natalie-Cynthia coming home any time soon? Because I'd really love to show her my boobs!'

Won't you be my neighbor?

The deed to the house arrived in the mail and I set it on the changing table.

The weather added to my insular existence; rain just kept coming. There was nothing to do but wait for it to stop and heat up the casserole.

Rhys' Birth Story

Hi, we were just in your store and I think we left a large, neon green rubber snake in your bulk section.

Did you say rubber snake, ma'am?

I'm afraid so.

This is how my labor started. Sort of. But let's back up to the morning of August 4.

I was excited to have just brought over that morning from our temporary Massachusetts accommodations of most of the summer to the new house, our house, what I needed to stay the night. It would be our first night all together there. It was also our 10^th wedding anniversary, one I had always believed we'd celebrate in Monterey with lots of friends.

But things were not where I could have ever anticipated them to be 10 years down the road... The POD was unloaded and sitting empty at the end of the driveway. The correct gas company had been summoned after a dumb misunderstanding that had us paying for someone's gas at this address in a city called Waymouth, MA – not where we live. That morning we'd interviewed a doula about the possibility of staying with Isaac during the birth. She seemed nice, if not ridiculously young and beautiful. Isaac had two days left of summer camp and while Mike attempted a stab at work, sitting with his laptop on the porch, I walked the third of a mile into the small town center, headed for the bookstore and lunch at my favorite cafe.

It was hot, but not exceedingly so by summer 2011 standards. I was having some contractions, but nothing exceedingly unusual by summer 2011 pregnancy standards.

I was happy. This simple walk. Time to myself. Time to try to take in that this was my space now. This unfamiliar neighborhood with the old growth trees and peace flags.

When I returned, Mike informed me that my mother-in-law and his aunt were coming over to wash the windows. As they like, I thought, and toppled over on the couch, exhausted. The women of Windex arrived and conquered, exclaiming all the while about how I walked “all that way!” into town.

Suddenly, it was late already – 4:30 – and I had yet to get to the grocery store. I felt like crap by now, but compelled to work on the shopping list. Isaac decided he was coming with me and so was his green snake.

I think that about catches us up to the opening telephone conversation.

After I got home, I reluctantly mentioned to Mike that the contractions felt different – a little rise to them. He looked downright frightened, but tried to cover it quickly. “You're not having a baby tonight, are you?” “Uh, nooooooooo,” I told him. Still, I thought it best to call the midwives.

When Isaac was born, our midwife, Maggie, barely got there in time. Two weeks early, a day before the home visit that would have saved Maggie from having to search blindly in the middle of the night for our apartment, Isaac shifted into position for exit. Then, an hour after she got there - wham, blam, thank you, ma'am, Isaac was out. Done. “Huh. And I thought you were going to be a pain in the ass,” Maggie marveled at me afterwards. “Thanks, Mag. Thanks a lot.”

Consequently, my midwives here drilled me with precautions about calling early when ANYTHING felt different. So I called. Their advice? Get in the bath and drink a glass of wine. Reason number 904 to hire a midwife and skip the doctor route.

If it's real labor, it won't stop the labor, they told me. If it's not, it will relax things.

I lumbered up the stairs to put Isaac to bed while Mike returned to our former place of residence to retrieve Emily cat. With Isaac was out cold, Mike hadn't returned, so I drew a bath as instructed.

When we first came to look at this house – second on our list of showings we'd lined up the day after crash landing in Massachusetts, I spotted a neighbor outside across the street. Mike was chatting up the realtor about furnaces while I slipped out the porch and over to the woman standing knee high in Queen Anne's Lace. We discussed the area a bit, the ages of the kids on the block and how she used to live in Palo Alto (CA). She seemed quite friendly and I was heartened.

Before I returned to actually look at the house we'd come to see, she lowered her voice and leaned in closer. I hear there is only one bathroom in there, she told me conspiratorially. Ooh. Neighborhood gossip. I liked it.

It is true that our new house has but a single bathroom. But neighbor lady only had part of the scoop – the bathroom had a beautiful claw foot tub...and no shower. No shower. It's an old house. It's a house CHOCK full of poorly orchestrated do-it-yourself projects. Over the last century, it's been added to, half-ass renovated, and (sort of) updated prior to putting it up for sale. But no one saw fit to add a pipe dripping warmish water from above. Mike's comment: “In a hundred years, no one wanted a shower?”

There is now a shower in the one bathroom. It only took a hundred years and one week. Imagine what we can accomplish from here. Anyhoo, let's return to that day – Rhys' day..Oh yeah, HIM! Was I writing about the birth of my son somewhere here? Or actually, let's return to the day before Rhys – OUR day – our damn anniversary...

I got into the claw foot tub that still lacked a shower and waited for my husband to get home. Seemed appropriate for an anniversary protocol. The claw foot tub ROCKED by the way. It was deep and comfortable and even in early labor and late pregnancy, my enormo-belly protruding out of the water like a great volcanic island, felt super.

Mike got home with Emily and a bottle of Riesling called “Relax” and we proceeded to the porch. Like the bath, the wine was great. However, neither seemed to stop the contractions which only intensified and prompted another call to the midwives around 10:30pm.

Mike was still looking wary of this whole thing, worried about how early the little person seemed to want to make his appearance.

By 11pm the first midwife arrived and though she talked about us getting a few more hours of sleep and coming back after setting up a few things “just in case,” she never left.

Now picture, if you will, boxes. Lots of boxes. Not much else besides boxes.

And picture, if you will, Mike and midwife ripping through boxes looking for all the supplies we needed for the home birth while mama sweated and groped for the occasional hand to hold.

Sometime shortly after midnight the second midwife arrived and joined the hunt.

Although just as quick, labor with Rhys was completely different than with Isaac. A different that was indisputable, but difficult to define and no less dramatic. Kind of like the earthquakes that shake vs. the ones that roll. Why do I sense that this metaphor will serve me on a variety of occasions as the boys grow up?

I was getting no relief between contractions because of the pressure of the bag of waters, which had never broken. It was an amebic pain without any clear signals about when to push or what to do at all. I will tell you that, sadly, I had nothing interesting to add to the lexicon during these intense hours. You'd think I'd be coining new expletives or - at the very least - cursing my husband. But my most oft used word was “Ouch” with a couple “Helps” sprinkled in. I was about a million degrees and demanding to be fanned, demanding attention that took my attending trio away from their continual search for more stuff they thought they needed for me to have this baby, but other than that, I was just slightly more whiny than usual as far as I recall.

I never quite found my rhythm with the labor. It was just too fast. The medical term is precipitous. The end came as a surprise to me. I could have had five minutes or five hours to go by then, I had no idea. But on the very same daddy-built bed as his brother arrived six years earlier, at 1:10am, on August 5, just clear of our anniversary date, Baby-baby, aka Rhys, entered the scene. 

Mike woke up Isaac just before his usual wake up time in the morning and told him we had a surprise for him downstairs. Having gone from excited about witnessing the birth to (after watching a couple birth videos) unsure if he really wanted to deal with all that, Isaac was not disappointed to have slept through it. He was very pleased to meet his brother, however, whom he (and the rest of us) continued to call Baby-baby.

Who knows what comes ahead of what. Did the walk “all that way” help bring on labor? Or did I walk all that way because labor was already in the works? Did Rhys come early because of all the craziness we endured during the pregnancy, or did I worry from week 18 that he would come early because I intuitively knew something?

Rhys was born at 36 weeks – just at the cut off of when I would be allowed to have him at home. This birth would have majorly sucked in the hospital. Everything about it would have signaled emergency to a hospital staff. My fitful, amebic pain would have had to be contained within a sterile cot and restricted by a monitor – several monitors. They would have taken him away from me. Suctioned him with machines.

And, really, what else would a baby skipping four weeks of gestation need more than just to be held by his mama?

“This is your new uterus,” one of the midwives told me sweeping her arm around the small room we'll eventually use as an office while discussing what special considerations this little preemie would need. I took in the boxes labeled things like “Isaac's books/toaster/Mike's diplomas,” thought about the pantry with its grimy thumb-tacked contact paper put up sometime between Watergate and Flashdance, and swallowed hard.

But as the sun entered the non-shatterproof glass on the window with the broken sash and chipping lead paint and spilled luxuriously across the fake wood vinyl flooring in the dining room just outside the “nursery” door, I knew it was the start of a new day.

everyone's happy on closing day

Meet the latest challenge in Emily's life.

Lucy.

As you may be able to divine, Lucy is a ferocious beast, ready to maul my poor girl the minute she gets the opportunity. She's all fang and slober and malice. She's...okay, she's a pile of depressed fluff because her family left her here while they go somewhere in Maine I can't pronounce. She took one sniff of cat from about 10 feet and ran the other way. The problem, however, is that Emily is oblivious to her power over this other animal. We are staying on the second floor, Emily's food and litter pan are in the basement, and in between there's...

Lucy.

And here she was thinking she was queen again. Sure, she smelled the cat that used to live here, up to just a few weeks before we arrived. Oh yeah, didn't I mention in my "the living and the dead" post a couple back that even my poor cat had to live in the shadow of death? Our host's cat died two months before we got here. He's buried in the backyard.

Times are tough, BUT! It's August. It really turned into August, like I never thought it would. Soon, these posts will include news of a house - our house! It's almost too much to believe.

August 1st = Our closing date. And everyone's happy on closing day, aren't they?

Here's the picture I have -- a bar, lots of dark wood, the TV monitors tuned to the Red Sox game but muted, the bartender drying out glasses or cutting lemons, a few couples eating at the surrounding tables. Now, over in the corner, near the waitress station, there are the realtors - ours and the seller's, their arms around each other, swaying. And what's that they are singing? "We're in the Money," I think. Their words are slurred a little, the shot glasses in their hands tilting out some of their moonshine. Before we pan away, several "Iloveyoumans" can be heard exchanged.

Oh! And look! There's the home inspector. He's given up the knee pads and the rubber shoe covers; he's looking sharp in a pressed white collar shirt open to his navel -- is that a gold medallion resting on his chest?? -- and he's leaning in toward the bartender, tracing his finger around and around the rim of his beer glass. I think he just licked his lips.

The loan officer from the bank is looking gooooood tonight. My oh my, I wouldn't have though she had it in her, but damn if she's not got that fishnet thigh wrapped around the pole on the stage in the back of the room. What would the underwriter think if she could see her now??? And she's stuffing hundred dollar bills in her own garter belt! Wow! Where could all that money that have come from?

Our lawyer is there, too, and, aw, gee, this is a little embarrassing, he's stripped down to his boxers and he's climbing up on the bar. He seems to be twirling his clothes around his head and gyrating his hips while occasionally letting out whooping noises and sucking down his vodka tonic."Easiest money I ever made!" he shouts over the jukebox (Bon Jovi's "Dead or Alive") and then rocks his air guitar. And of course the paralegal is standing nearby, his right hand man. He just called for another round for the bar on Kitty and Mike!!

Parrrrr-teeeeee, Baby!

So raise a glass tonight, wherever you may be. It's on us.