Renovation Day 1

The sky was a watercolor cadet blue when I left this morning. I came struggling out of my mother's garage dragging my little dog, bags dangling from my shoulder. She tugged at her leash as I guided her down the street in search of my car. I loaded us both in the car and drove back to the garage for my older daughter so I could take her to school. Classes start at just after seven so we are up early every morning.

I am taking my daughter to school every morning because we are living with my mother. I have piled my husband, two kids, and our dog into my mother's three bedroom condo because we have decided to blast apart our center hall colonial to create a more livable, usable space. Today is the day construction starts, so after I take my little dog for her morning romp in the ball field, I swing by the house to take down the trash.

The poor little dog is so confused, having her bed moved into a strange building full of suspicious noises and coming back to sniff her own house. This morning the entire main level is empty (except the garage) and my voice echoes off the walls. Sunlight streams in the front windows, and I take "before" pictures. The old dining room, the crazy kitchen, the dreadful center hall. I drag the last bags of trash down to the street and take one last look around.

I hold the door open for the dog, and she gives me a look that says, "But this is my house!" She turns and trots away, and I have to walk behind her to encourage her to leave. We walk down the steps of our concrete stoop and drive away into uncertain future.

The next time I see my front door the steps leading to it are lying in pieces in the front yard, which has been overrun by machines. The patio has become a giant hole full of rocks. The kitchen cabinets have lost their doors, and a great gaping hole sits yawning where the oven used to be. (This was the oven with the broiler element that dangled by a couple of screws and threatened to fall on our morning toast. I used to pray every time I used it--Last Rites.)

I had left the basement bookshelves almost cleared. A hurricane glass from Pat O'Brien's full of coins and a small vase with dried flowers had been sitting in a corner near empty aquarium equipment boxes. Now everything in the room has been moved to the center and practically shrink wrapped with heavy plastic. The work crew has certainly been efficient.

I go back outside and survey the scene--to me it looks like a movie "bigature" created with children's toys, the work crew having been filmed earlier on a green screen. I watch with a mixture of excitement and fear. The excitement is generated by a sense of unstoppable motion--the snowball has started rolling down the hill, gathering speed. The fear is born of risk. To make such an investment in an uncertain economy is stepping out of our comfort zone.

This is no mere building project for us. It is the adventure of a lifetime, a reaching for a great prize. We have wanted to do this project for years, and now we have finally gained the courage to conquer obstacle after obstacle to make it happen. Today is just the beginning.

Delusional

I am looking forward to moving in with my mother. It's unbelievable. My mother is a wonderful woman, but she is the person who thought I could do nothing right for the first forty years of my life. I've been able to spend a lot of time with her over the past few years (thank you, God), and I feel now we could get along, just the two of us. But it isn't just me. I'm dragging along my husband, two daughters, and our small dog, and the six of us will be piled into my mother's three bedroom condo for five or six months. And I'm the only one who is delusional enough to look forward to it.

My husband is easy to get along with, as long as he has baseball, good food, time to himself to wander around the city, and time to go to the ocean and sit in relative solitude on the beach. My older daughter is a teenager, and as far as I'm concerned she is easy to get along with...as far as teenagers go. She requires a willingness to listen to her chatter, her teen angst, and her singing (and her singing isn't bad). She has her moods, but so do we all.

My younger daughter demands dessert, movies, trips to Chuck E. Cheese, chewing gum, toys, play dates, and constant attention. What she really demands is an ocean of patience. The moment she thinks the world is not marching to her tune, she lifts up her voice and stretches out of the floor. She will be heard.

Last night, for example, I asked her to show me her watch, the watch we gave her for her ninth birthday. She yelled, "Noooo...." and ran to her room and locked the door. I stood outside and commanded her to let me in with as calm and firm a tone as I could muster. She cracked the door and then grudgingly stepped aside to let me enter.

"Your watch?" I held out my hand.

Witty a long suffering sigh, she thrust it at me.

"Can you set it?" I asked. "Can you pull it out of the band?"

She pulled it out and handed it to me. She had calmed down enough to watch me fiddle with the knob.

"What are you doing?" she wanted to know, as I turned the hands forward one hour.

"We're springing forward," I told her. I proceeded to show her how I set our bedroom clock radio forward. I don't know whether she got the concept, but in the end she danced away, secure in the notion that I was not going to confiscate her watch. Somehow I had gotten through the intractable moment and reached her.

My older daughter came over to me later and gave me a hug. "Do we really have to move over to Nana's?" she asked quietly in my ear. "I'm not going to any space all to myself."

I held her close. "We're going to have to work on that," I whispered back. "We're going to have to be creative."

Our small dog has started watching us apprehensively, as we sort, toss, and pack our stuff. Having had her crate and pillow washed and having suffered through a bath, she suspects some unknown, and therefore fearful, change. Deprived of a place to curl up with all her comforts in the wash, she sat wagging at my feet, a low whine rising in her throat. I let her jump in my lap and rubbed her ears while I read the paper.

After the girls had gone to bed, my husband sat swiveling thoughtfully in his office chair. "How are we all going to get along over there?" he wondered, his voice heavy with pessimism.

I leaned over, squeezed his shoulders, and didn't answer. I don't know how we are all going to get along over there. I imagine our tempers will fray and our personalities will rub uncomfortably against each other. I'm sure I will have moments of despair that those I love best will be more than I can handle. Yet I know I have some important life lessons waiting for me, and I might as well ready myself for the challenge. Delusional? Maybe. But at least I'm not running and hiding.

Giving Myself Advice

Sometimes I have to give myself advice. It helps to examine my problem with objective eyes, as if it belonged to someone else. My problem is that despite repeating my mantra of, "Slow and steady wins the race," I feel a rising wave of panic as I race the calendar to get my house ready for construction work. All of the hours I've spent--15 minutes at a time--clearing out, organizing, and packing up my stuff don't seem to have made a dent in the workload.

Common sense tells me that this is not true. Even though I feel surrounded by my stuff (instead of surrounded by neatly labeled boxes), I know that clearing clutter generates energy. Having gotten rid of four trash bins worth of stuff, I can think more clearly. I can make decisions on packing and storing our belongings. I know where our stuff is. Best of all I have an internal drive to keep going, to keep sorting and tossing and packing. My challenge now, is stopping.

Now that my mind and my home are beginning to clear, I am able to ask the important questions. What one task or small project would give the most sense of visual progress? What one task or small project would give the most sense of actual progress? What can I do to get past the halfway point, so I can begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel? Asking myself these questions keeps me calm and it keeps me thinking, planning, and working more effectively. Giving myself advice helps dissolve the panic.