Reacting to a little kitty poor behavior last night, my husband and I sank down on the couch after a bit of a disrupted meal. The cat was fine, our house was fine and this behavior is a bit expected by now. Still, it adds a layer of complexity to our lives. And it had been a day. I had worked three hours, mowed for four hours, took the kitties outside for an hour and we spent about an hour digging and cleaning sweet potatoes. In the meantime, my husband is working nine hour days to take a half-day on Friday.
In that moment last night, my hubby was overwhelmed. His comment, “We sure don’t make life easy for ourselves.” I asked him about it and he mentioned the house, the large garden and the four rescues. He didn’t mention getting firewood, the long driveway to shovel or any of those other tasks we do that normal folks don’t, but he was just providing a small list of examples. Yes, they are all work. But my view? Give me six weeks.
In six weeks, the garden will be fallow, the leaves will be taken care of for another season and the kitties will be a little more adjusted to their outdoor time. I’ll still be working less and this family can finally find that elusive “down time” that other folks get. And next spring, we have planned a very small garden which should make our lives easier for a full year.
Honestly, it does feel like a cycle around here. Initially, we were both working too much to maintain our lifestyle. Then, I wasn’t working so much but we were doing renovations. Then, the deck. It nearly killed us but it ushered in an era of “no renovations for a year”. Now? Hmm… I’m only 16 days into my version of retirement and we haven’t yet seen the fruits of my home labor fully pay off. Still, I believe we will get there. In fact, I may already be there.
Assuming my husband’s feelings of being stretched too thin relate to his extra work, need to prepare for our trip and his commitment to his workouts as well, I think his feelings will recede a bit once we get on the plane. Plus, I suspect that when I pick him up from the airport a little over a week later, he will come home to a calm, very quiet house. That alone should alleviate some burden.
As for me? Well, I am already feeling like there is downtime again. In fact, as I was mowing yesterday, I thought about this good mojo I’ve got going and how I could best describe it. It’s hard but it reminds me of growing up, when home was just, well, home. Since that description is not helpful, let me try again. I remember home being easy and calm. It was like the feeling you get when you’re outdoors in fall or winter and you look back to see the lights in the house come on. Home feels stress-free. It feels warm, safe and kind. It feels like routine mixed with love. Home doesn’t feel burdensome or overwhelming to me. Instead, it feels like life now moves at a leisurely pace. I have enough time to do all of the things I want to do along with all of the things I need to do.
Now, it does strike me that my husband and I are in completely different places. I’m retired and he isn’t. Plus, he has the full burden of our everyday expenses, although I work enough to offset those as well and we candidly live about as cheaply as two people possibly could. No mortgage or car payments and it costs us exactly $67 to heat, cool and power our 3,000-square-foot home (thanks to geothermal and solar). But it also emphasizes to me my challenge: to make this work for both of us.
When I think back, I can see that my mom clearly did. She was a college-educated stay-at-home mom before it became cool again. And our house was calm. Yes, there were seasons and tasks within each season. Yes, thee were busy times and outside stressors that wanted to come in. She never let them stay for long and she managed it for the whole family.
That’s my challenge and it’s a challenge I want. I want to create for him a stress-free and calm environment. I want him to feel like things just suddenly got easier without any real understanding of why. I want him to not necessarily notice that our evenings are routinely calm until he looks around one day and notices it’s been that way for a while. I want the same for our weekends. He’s in the phase right now where he appreciates my mowing and cleaning and general “taking care of things” but he doesn’t yet feel the full impact. That will happen when enough time has passed to create that environment on such a regular pace that it no longer feels special. That’s what I’m shooting for.
But I’m going to need some time. With a trip – mostly for him – this upcoming week, life will feel both exhausting and uprooting. So, he’ll need one week home just to calm down. Then? Then, it can start to get good. I’ll use that week he’s gone and I’m home to clear the decks of some of the things I just can’t do when he’s around. Therefore, when he gets home, we will start fresh. In two weeks, I expect he will notice something. In a month? Yeah, we’re gonna be “there”. (Of course, then I go away for work, but you can’t have everything.)
Still, it’s about to bust wide open here into the good times for both of us. I can tell by the view from here.
The Yuppie Homesteader 