Women, is it our generation's destiny to renovate constantly? Nothing ever gets DONE, it's always a goddamn Tolstoy work in progress. Goddamn domestic entropy.
I am peevish. The last two weeks has been a quiet epic of preparing the house for realtors and prospective buyers. Luckily, thanks to the miracles of refinancing, I am able to pay men of all shapes and sizes to do most of the work. Tradesmen trooping through and over my house, repairing and powerwashing and chimneysweeping and ripping out the hideous salmon carpet that had been molting upstairs since we moved in and that we'd never got around to replacing. It is now festering in a dumpster, and I pray it does not come home to spawn.
Everything is insanely neutral now, which should appeal to People. It all looks quite nice and is functional and makes me ponder why I never fixed things before, such as the dishwasher. I have not had an operational dishwasher for eight years, and forgot how convenient they are. There is a metaphor in there, about passing one's on needs over (Could you please fix the dishwasher?) in pursuit of the greater good (Oh, okay, if you're busy tuning up your dirtbike I'll just continue to wash by hand...). I'm reminded of Shelley Duvall in The Shining, trying to keep things together while Jackie-boy goes off the rails. She was so good at forced cheerfullness, I think we all learned from her.
The question that really remains is why on earth I just didn't go ahead and get all this stuff fixed without the help of my ex. Well, the best I can come up with is paralysis.
There's also the fair factor, i.e. HE SAID HE WOULD, but this is fairly minor. I wanted to believe him. It's like the people who see the image of Jesus on burnt toast or fridge mold; you want so hard to believe. Jeez. But minor point.
Paralysis is more likely. The rationale, if I can recall, is if I got that one small thing fixed, it would be logical to also get this other small thing fixed, which would necessitate the big thing getting fixed, which we can't afford. Hence a passive acceptance of The Way Things Are.
It's been good to git'erdone, though I am very tired. I have managed not to kill myself, balanced on an adaptable stepladder 16ft up in my ridiculously impractical foyer with a laden paint roller at 2:30am while classic rock played tinnily on my cheap clock radio. I did not fall off the roof, where I dragged my handyman to help me scrape moss of the tired shingles. And I have managed to restrain myself from throwing all the ex's stuff into a giant dumpster as he has not made the time to come and pack and move it himself.
This last one has me pissed. Righteously pissed, which is hard for me to find the humour in. I am not going for sainthood anytime soon, and it makes me seethe to wait and wait for him to come back and collect his many many things.
"I work," he says, "I work all the time and work is crazy. You don't understand how crazy my work is. I wish I had the time to come over and get it all and figure out a better living situation so I can take the dog, but I can't. You don't understand just how intense my work is."
No, I do not. It is no longer my job to understand. I receive no money from him and have been covering all the house expenses for the last several months on an income which, incidentally, is less stable and smaller than his. Where his money goes, I don't know. I do not understand, he is right. But as I receive no benefit from his crazy, intense work it really doesn't matter to me what he is doing with his time.
To explain this to someone who, for some reason--when I'm feeling generous, I ascribe it to a physiological malfunction of his brain--is incapable of empathy is to risk unleashing a fury so great it may cause me to do bodily harm to him. This may be excrutiatingly satisfying on one level, but ultimately is not a good thing.
I am mere days away from getting a legal separation agreement in my hands, my hobbit of a lawyer is working on it right now. Once I get sign off from the ex and feel legally protected financially, it may be harder to restrain myself. The frustration may devour me, of packing up someone else's shit that they've never bothered to sort through themselves, of discovering stacks of high-end clothing and sports gear with price tags still on while I was wearing sports bras held together (I kid you not) with binder clips, of surveying garage and workshop filled to the rafters and coolly estimating a value of about $40,000 for toys amassed while I was scrabbling to pay bills and going deeper into debt and generally enjoying the view while my head was up my ass.
Aha! There's the rub, that prevents me from wallowing too deep in the outrage. It was my choice to wear blinders and enable the bad behaviour; it was my choice to pass myself over and place someone else's desires above my own needs. Me, me, me. So yeah, focusing on gittin'erdone is safer for everyone, and I'm almost there. Once I'm done, there will be no need to dwell on my ex's imperfections or my own sorry role in the matter, and I can congratulate myself for having learned an important life lesson and to be so, so much wiser for the experience.
In the meantime, I do take savage comfort in The Shining. For if you recall, dear cheery wifey Wendy does end up bashing crazy Jack in the head with a baseball bat, and locking him in the cold storage room. He later freezes to death in the topiary maze. Fuckin' A.
Snarlingly,
G
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