I’m a planner. I love to plan things. I have notebooks filled with lists of the way I want my days, months, and even years to go. All the things I want to accomplish.
The bitter truth however is that almost the only thing ever accomplished is the large stack of notebooks themselves.
My plans have almost never worked out the way I wanted them to. At some point this series of disappointments got the better of me and led me to be the kind of person who gives up quite easily. The only thing it seems I haven’t given up on is the lists I make regarding the things I want to do.
When we moved here, to this small corner of the woods, my husband and I were extremely stressed and felt much older than two people in their late 20’s. We had no idea what we really wanted anymore. All of our plans had fallen apart. We’d had a baby young, gotten married young, and purchased a 3-bed 2-bath brick house in a small suburb, way too young.
Our plan had been to fix the house, resell, and use the profit we made to build our dream off-the-grid (as much as we could comfortably stand) home. It seemed like a relatively easy task (hahahaha). The house had been built in the mid 60’s, and was well under the budget we had assumed we had through our completely miscalculated math, as well as some of those mortgage calculators on the realty sites. It appeared well maintained and seemed to only need up to date decor and paint.
The next few steps in the process are, in my memory, a blur. As if by going to just look at the house we had gotten on to a roller coaster. When we made an offer we topped the first hill and…away we went.
It passed it’s home inspection with flying colors.
We qualified for some really crazy amazing first time home buyers loan.
My husband was 24 and I was 21. Our daughter was one and a half.
We realized all too late that the house payment itself was more than we’d been prepared for. There were all sorts of things added in that I’d never heard of. Words that sounded like tie breakers in a champion spelling bee. People in business suits smiled and passed us pens.
We were idiots. We should have said no and ran like hell. But we just looked at each other, pale and nauseous, stupidly signing away like automatons.
I think deep down we both knew that we’d just shit on all our “plans”.
After all a big part of the plan was me at home raising our daughter, fixing up the house, finishing up my college degree, which meant we needed to be able to make it on one paycheck.
We were only in the house a few months when I discovered that I was pregnant with our second child. During the months of my second pregnancy the house began to show its age. There had been no repairs, or changes to the house other than carpet and paint since it had been built in the 60’s, and now things were falling apart in bits and pieces almost weekly.
I compare the stress I felt at this time in my life to throwing a child into the deep end of the pool in order to “teach” them to swim. All I could do was keep my head above water, but it was an exhausting process only fueled by the fear of what would happen when I could no longer physically (and mentally) do so.
We spent almost eight years in that house and it never felt like home. Not only was the stress of the upkeep and mortgage enough to keep us awake at night but as two kids who’d spent the majority of their lives in the country, we never adjusted to street lights and constant noise. Cars, semis from the nearby highway, and a variety of sirens were the background soundtrack that played at all hours.
We didn’t give up though. We put a lot of work into that house. We redid the floors and repainted every room. Tore down rotted Sheetrock and replaced it. Re bricked, added a deck, redid the piping under the house, remodeled the kitchen and dining room. Remodeled the living room. What was supposed to be simple cosmetics that I could do alone was really in depth construction work my husband had to do after work while I tried to help in the little ways I could, which was mostly keeping small hands and fingers off of tools.
It never felt like ours.
While many of our friends were graduating college, getting married, and beginning to think about having kids, my husband and I were pouring blood, sweat, tears, and every extra penny into a small brick house on a (slightly) quiet street in town. On the outside it must have looked like we were doing really well for ourselves. But on the inside all we ever talked about was getting out of that damn house.
We jumped at the chance to move back into the woods. Even though we were moving from a cute brick home in the suburbs to an aging mobile home in the middle of nowhere, the reverse of the ideal American Dream, we knew it was the right thing to do. We wanted the woods, I wanted chickens, and the kids needed a place where they could run and yell and not be watched by unknown neighbors.
*It should be noted that for all our trials and tribulations on that house, that brick ranch American Dream, we only profited a grand total of $1,100.
It was not an easy adjustment. From a family of four in a house with large rooms to a mobile home where everything was adjusted to fit just right into a 16 by 80 rectangle, we had to do a lot of rethinking. For starters, there was no way all of our things would fit. One of the kids bedrooms was the size of the laundry room in the old house, and there was no attic, only a rundown storage building with no door. We quickly discovered that any ideas we may or may not have had about going the tiny house path (okay, it was just me) were quickly squashed like fat dog ticks.
But we had chickens. We had trees. A tree house, and a more peaceful quiet than I could’ve hoped for. The night sky was clearer than we’d seen in a long time.
The first few years here were tough. We all, all four of us the kids included, went through a lot of personal things. Health, both mental and physical, was not in good standing for my husband and I, and our stress had carried over to the kids. The guilt of which compounded the issue, and all of it was multiplied by lack of health insurance.
Our new home was also falling apart in ways that felt like some deja vu nightmare. We seemed to be constantly finding things that we hadn’t noticed before, and with no profit from the old house, not everything could be fixed. I was trying to finish my last year of school as quickly as possible in order to help, which is probably a contributing factor to my current nervous issues.
I would like to say that the last two years were complete upswings. I would like to be more Sunshine Sally than Debbie Downer. I would looove to tell you how we fixed everything and then sell you some $300 two week course on how you too can be happy, healthy, environmentally sustainable and financially stable. But this isn’t that.
My chickens were murdered. We had to kill an angry raccoon who had literally ripped them open for eggs. Our gardens have been mostly hit or miss. Our stresses are fewer, thanks mostly to medication, but we’re still fixing and building. We’re still trying.
We’ll get more chickens soon and I’ll keep writing. I’m doing every I can to check things off those lists.
A Hermitess 