I want to talk a little about how it was having Rob home for winter break, because it matched my friend Leigh’s experience having her college-age daughter home, and both of us felt a little grim at all the pictures we saw of other people’s college kids home and doing affectionate selfies with their moms or whatever. “Got my girl back in the nest! Love seeing her sweet face every morning!” and so on. Whereas Leigh and I were not seeing our kids’ faces until more like 3:30 in the afternoon, and the faces did not have particularly sweet expressions on them.

Leigh reported that her daughter was fairly reluctant to do family stuff or participate in household activities, and that she was back-talky and irritable and eye-rolly. Rob was only occasionally back-talky and irritable, but he was unenthusiastic, and almost the entire time he was home he radiated the impression of suppressing eye-rolls. He gave off the sense of not being real impressed with us as a family/household. As if he were making an effort to be as patient and tolerant and as good-natured as he could be, but that we were fairly inferior as families/households go, and he was finding a lot to silently (or sometimes not silently) criticize. (You can see how this could be all in my head: “gave off the sense,” “radiated the impression,” “silently criticize.” But I don’t think I’m wrong. I’ll ask him in a decade.) He disapproves of the way we handle the other kids. He disapproves of the amount of cleaning we do, or rather don’t do. He disapproves of our dishwasher’s effectiveness. He disapproves of how much stuff we have. (What’s it to him, if I might ask?) He was especially seeming-to-bite-his-tongue about Paul, and a couple of times made inappropriately rebuking remarks to Paul, or critical/complaining remarks to me about Paul. (I don’t know if he said similar things to Paul about me. I didn’t tell Paul that Rob said things about him, and Paul might similarly be sparing me.)

I remember reading (in a book about teenagers, when Rob was an earlier teenager going through a similar stage) that this kind of irritating/heartbreaking stuff is in fact considered crucially important if the child is going to be able to successfully separate from the parents and vice versa. Though (my mind answers back, apparently eager to cast off the full comfort of this assurance): there is a lot of variety in how kids go through this stage. Not everybody gets the disapproval and the suppressed eye-rolls—though of course many get far, far, far worse. I’m remembering our former neighbor who wrote a piece for the local paper to explain how despite being as good and careful a parent as she could be, and having a couple of children turn out very well, she had been bafflingly unable to control her teenaged daughter or even keep her in school or at home; that before this happened to her daughter/family, she’d thought such things indicated a serious parenting issue, and now she cringed to think of other people viewing her family this way.

I remember having my own mixed feelings about my family growing up—and I was widely considered to have a very good family and home life. I remember friends having very negative things to say about their families. Some of them had a lot of reasons to criticize; some didn’t, but still did. It was a common conversation topic in high school and then in college: What’s Wrong With My Parents.

Now my friends only occasionally talk about what’s wrong with their parents (still a fun topic, though); more often we talk about what’s wrong with our spouses/children. And so part of me is thinking this too shall pass etc., and that one day Rob will seem glad to be home and seem to want to spend time with us, instead of seeming like he’s deliberately avoiding us. But part of me is doing that thing where a parent can’t help but project the current stage all the way into the permanent future: What if she NEVER sleeps without me sitting in the room with her?? What if he NEVER stops needing a diaper at night?? What if she NEVER learns to eat more foods?? What if he NEVER learns to independently handle his schoolwork?? What if she ALWAYS goes mute when she’s upset?? What if he ALWAYS throws things when he loses his temper?? What if she ALWAYS dates terrible people?? What if he ALWAYS dislikes us and thinks we’re inferior parents running an inferior family/household?? I’m picturing him telling his future friends/spouse/kids all the ways he is avoiding being like us. And some people really never do come around to liking their families much or identifying with the way they live, and that has to be okay too.

But it was a little disheartening to feel the disapproval. And frankly kind of annoying. None of us are perfect parents, none of us run perfect households, all of us do some stuff the non-ideal way, all of us make regular mistakes. We all have limited resources to apply to the pursuit of The Highest and Best Way To Live—as well as having different ideas about what even IS The Highest and Best Way To Live. (And it is a LITTLE EARLY for him to think he has it figured out better than we do, considering he hasn’t even TRIED any of this stuff yet.) What we hope for, or at least what I hope for, is that if we do a reasonably decent human job of things, eventually the children will be adults who will understand the gist of it: that they will think, “Back then I felt my parents should have met these ideals or been better people in such-and-such a way, but now I see that everyone has their own ideals and their own strengths/weaknesses” and “My mom does things one way, and I do things a different way, but that doesn’t mean one way is RIGHT and the other is WRONG.” One hopes (I hope) that in the end, the grown children come to an understanding that everyone is just another imperfect person, including their parents, including themselves, including absolutely everyone they know—and so they will be easy on themselves, and on others, and ideally also on me.

We all (except Rob, who is back at college) went to see the movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It was at my insistence, which was a bit of a surprise to Paul who generally finds me rather tepid about superhero or comic-book movies. I can only watch so many men using fantasy/glory scenarios to wrestle with their father issues while gaining emotional motivation from the endangerment/pain/death of women before I get a little weary of the theme.

Anyway, I saw many, many highly positive mentions of this movie online, including this one from @birbigs:

And I saw lots of other people saying similar things: that they’re not into superhero stuff or comic-book stuff but they nevertheless loved the movie. So, fine. And it won an award, so.

It would be best to see it without all the build-up: like, if I’d gone to see it reluctantly/resentfully because the kids wanted to see it, I would have been rather blown away. But the trouble is: without the build-up, I wouldn’t have gone to see it. Which means that while I don’t want to build it up too much for you, I do want to build it up enough to encourage you to see it—especially if, like me, you are not normally into superheros and comic books.

I can say I considered it worth it to see it in the theater: it is a visually fun movie, and it’s nice to see that LARGE. I found it a HEARTENING movie. There was enough humor. There were some good Men Showing Emotions moments. There was Lily Tomlin voicing Aunt May. Naturally there were Daddy Issues and violence, but it was not too much for me and I am pretty dicey about violence; it helped that it was all animated. I’m not sure there was even any blood, and in my memory it seems as if most violent acts were done out of view: for example, you “see” a bad guy crush a good guy, but you only see the arm going up and the fist going down, and the actual act is hidden by the bad guy’s back. But there are a couple of emotionally upsetting deaths. There’s no sex or nudity at all, just a tiny bit of mild friendly flirting.

Anyway I recommend it! Go see it! If you want to! And maybe even if you don’t particularly want to!

Months and months ago, almost a YEAR ago, I asked your advice about replacing my coffee-maker. Then I dithered around and did nothing, because my coffee-maker was still usable and so I wasn’t in the state of adrenaline/emergency that is apparently the only way I can motivate myself to take action / make decisions on things.

Then I dropped my coffee-maker’s carafe Friday night and it shattered everywhere, and wasn’t I glad to have collected advice in advance! I spent part of Friday night and part of Saturday morning re-reading all the comments, looking at coffee-makers, and adding and subtracting to my cart. I ended up ordering the Cuisinart DCC-3200 14-cup Programmable Coffee Maker. I like that it loads water/coffee basically the way I’m used to. I like that I can see through the carafe, even though that also means I can drop and shatter the carafe (but I’ve only done that once! once!). I like that there is a lot of talk about how hot it keeps the coffee.

I compared prices to see if I should just zip out that very day and buy the new one, but I still had my old 4-cup Mr. Coffee to use as an emergency back-up, so instead I ordered from Amazon; the new pot was supposed to arrive Monday. Monday late afternoon, the tracking was still saying it would arrive by 9:00 p.m.; at 5:01 p.m. I got an email saying the delivery was running late and would arrive Tuesday or Wednesday. It was the “or Wednesday” that got me, combined with the email suggestion that I could always track my package for the latest updates. Oh can I? Thanks, that helps!

I have Prime shipping, and I have allowed many, many, many, many guaranteed-delivery-date packages to arrive late without consequence because it didn’t really matter and for the most part I don’t need packages to arrive that quickly. I mostly wanted the FREE part of the shipping rather than the 2-day part. But just last week we were charged ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN U.S. DOLLARS for a year of Prime shipping, which is high enough that Paul and I discussed cancelling it and came very close to doing so, and that discussion was fresh in my mind.

And also I was finally fed up. I love Amazon, and I love shopping there. But I keep hearing how it can be considered dicey to shop at Amazon for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile the rates for Prime keep going up, and more and more of the items don’t even qualify for Prime shipping (or perplexingly, some of them say they qualify and yet the cheerful prediction for arrival is four days or eight days or whatever) (honest to god, do not explain this to me, I already know there are “reasons!” and my complaint is that those are not GOOD reasons and/or that the items should not then claim to qualify as Prime items). And now they’re using their own Uber/Lyft-like delivery system which means strangers drive unmarked cars into my driveway and startle me, and these new delivery people keep falsely marking the delivery “handed directly to a resident,” making it difficult to protest to Amazon when it wasn’t in fact delivered at all, or when it was left in the dirt under a dripping roof. Plus, I have concerns about the vetting and pay/benefits of such non-employees.

So with all of this, with all of these costs paid in money and in ethical compromise, it should at least, at LEAST be reasonable to expect them to compensate customers when they don’t keep the few promises they DO make. So I contacted Amazon and they gave me a $10 credit. Which is nice, and I am satisfied: that’s one month’s worth of Prime.

But from now on I will be paying attention. I will notice which items guarantee the delivery date, and I will watch to make sure they arrive by that date; if they don’t, I will contact Amazon. Before, I let it slide. I let it slide again and again because I didn’t care enough and I didn’t know what to do when I DID care enough. And because I and many other people let it slide like this, Amazon felt comfortable continuing to push it. But they pushed it too far and too many times, and it crossed a line that forced me to notice and care, and now I DO know what to do, and so I will be doing it. If they had kept it at the old level, they could have gotten away with it basically forever. But because they went too far, they tripped a switch and I will now be tracking the situation closely. It is a useful metaphor for our times.

Here is how I got the credit:

1. Scroll down to the bottom of an Amazon page and select “Contact Us.”

2. It will ask a series of questions, with little pull-down menus. I selected that it was about “An order I placed,” and then I had to say “Choose different order” to find the one I wanted, and I selected that order. Then I selected “Problem with an order.” Then I selected “Shipping or delivery issues.” Then I selected “Shipment is late.”

3. It gave me a little “Did you know?” thing about tracking my orders. THANKS YES I KNOW I CAN TRACK MY LATE ORDER TO OBSERVE IT BEING LATE. I scrolled down a little further to “Or, talk to someone.” I would have preferred an email option, but it only had phone or chat, so I selected chat. It opened a new window and started a chat.

4. I kept in mind that the person who has to answer these chats is 100% not personally responsible for the late delivery of my package. I said that I’d received an email that my item would be late, and that I was writing to ask if that particular item had qualified for the delivery guarantee (I could not figure out how to tell; it apparently tells you during the ordering process but not afterward). The customer service representative asked for two minutes to investigate. When she came back, she said it had been shipped on time and the delay was the deliverer’s fault; she did the cut-and-paste things that every Amazon customer service rep does about how this doesn’t usually happen, they haven’t met their own standards of excellence, they apologize. Then she offered the $10 credit, and I thanked her for her help. The end.

Interestingly, this morning when I took their suggestion to track my package, I could see that the tracking had been updated: yesterday afternoon it said it was “out for delivery,” but now that has been revised to tell me that yesterday afternoon it was in fact MANY STATES AWAY. At 7:00 in the evening, two hours after they’d told me it would be delayed, it arrived at another location two states away. At 5:00 this morning it finally arrived in my state. So this means it is even less helpful than I’d thought to watch a package being late, since I can’t even watch it being late: I first have to watch it neeeeearly arrive on time, and THEN see it be cast backward into another dimension where it was late all along.

Today I have to make myself go over to the old house and do some work. I dread these trips so much. It gives me an extremely unpleasant mix of feelings—like seeing an ex, when you’re not really done with the relationship. Or, less melodramatically: it’s sucky work at this point (picking through the stuff that piles up under furniture, collecting the last and totally miscellaneous/random possessions, cleaning up areas that are too dirty for me to want the cleaners to see them), and it feels like it’s going on forever. Definitely it would have been better to have listened to all the people advising us to treat it as a cross-country move so that everything happened on one day; but I was not able to manage that, so now we’re doing it this way, and this is going to be okay too. I assume.

And we’re so close to being done, even at our slow, slow pace! For awhile it seemed as if every trip revealed new depressing discoveries. My mom describes dealing with her parents’ house when her parents moved into a nursing home, and how it seemed as if she just kept opening more doors to more areas packed with more stuff, and that’s how it felt for awhile at my old house. But now it is more like emptying out that one last drawer, cleaning off that last shelf, throwing away those last scraps. So if I can just MAKE MYSELF deal with it, it will be DONE and we can move on to the stage where we get a real estate agent to advise us what we should do next.

Specifically, we’re not sure how much work we should put into it—or rather, pay to have other people put into it. What we’re thinking of doing is having the floors refinished and the walls painted and the whole place cleaned. But maybe the agent will say that if we’re not going to do anything to the 1959 kitchen (which we are not), we might as well save ourselves the time/effort/money and sell it to a flipper. Or maybe the agent will say that we would be surprised at how much we could add to the price if we also got the popcorn ceilings taken care of and the cabinets painted. And quite possibly the agent is going to explain what I’ve been hearing on the news, which is that the housing market is extremely affected by this government shut-down and at this point we might as well just hang out until that’s over, and too bad we didn’t list it back when we bought this house.

Oh! I almost forgot to tell you about something that has been RADICALLY HELPFUL for my mood and state of mind! This book:

(image from Amazon.com)

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. (Don’t read the foreword if you haven’t read the book: it’s full of spoilers.) Miss Grace mentioned it as a book she read over and over again as a child, and it sounded exactly like the kind of book I would have read over and over again as a child (Little House books; Five Little Peppers books; All of a Kind Family; Little Women), so I got it out of the library and I just love it. BUT ALSO: it is about a family living in poverty a hundred years ago, so there are a lot of scenes where, for example, the child is sent to buy six stale loaves of bread at two loaves for a nickel, and the mother makes that bread last all week for meals, and once a week they get a tiny bit of the gristly fatty reject meat from the butcher and that is such a treat. The children collect trash to trade for pennies, which they use to buy broken crackers and penny candy. The mother is trying so hard to save a few pennies every week because HER mother says the most important thing is to try to own a scrap of land you can pass down to your children—but every time the money in the can starts to build up to something, they have to use it for an emergency. They have to move several times, from one grim apartment to another grim apartment. The mother is struggling to see if she can achieve the huge accomplishment of letting the kids graduate from 8th grade before they’ll have to quit and go out to work.

I’ll tell you what: if you are stressing about how much it costs to heat a big old house, or whether the move from one house to another house was a good idea, it can snap things into perspective to read about this level of life struggle. Picturing that mother looking up incredulously from floor-scrubbing to observe how much wailing and fretting I am doing over THIS LIFE I HAVE is…perspective-resetting. I have been reading the book every day for a week or more, and I haven’t had a single panic about my own life. If I start to fret, I immediately think, “We are fine. We are FINE. Look how many pennies we have for candy!”

And yet it’s not a DEPRESSING book. I mean, it is, a little, in some ways. But as with the Little House / Five Little Peppers books, there is more of a feeling of triumph over adversity, and perseverance in the face of hardship. And the book is from a child’s perspective, so to her this is all normal and not depressing. And so often I am thinking things such as “Yay, this means a whole $1.50 more per week for them!!” instead of “Oh no, not another disaster!” Like, do you remember reading books where a child is agonizing over how to spend a nickel on candy, and it would make your heart race happily to read about the resulting little paper sacks of treats? It is THAT feeling, rather the “Only a nickel??” feeling. Combined with the “And we are so lucky!” feeling.

Something odd was going on at our McDonald’s this morning. (I warn you this does not turn out to be an interesting story.) Normally there is a steady line for the drive-through plus plenty of cars in the parking lot; this morning the parking lot was empty except for a few cars in the employee area, and I was the only one in the drive-through. Hash browns were listed as $2.00 but rang up at $2.19. The clerk didn’t give me my change, which I decided not to discuss as (1) it was a matter of a few cents, (2) she had already closed the drawer and walked off, and I was not sure we could successfully recreate the transaction without more time and hassle than those cents were worth, (3) there was room to believe it was a misunderstanding and/or my fault (I was digging for payment in the change compartment in dim light, and may have given her different coins than I thought I did; she may in fact have received too few coins but decided not to pursue it), and (4) when she returned to the window, she coughed in a way that made me think it was probably best not to receive coins from her hand. There was egg on the Sausage McMuffin Without Egg, and a half-inch stack of napkins in the bag when normally they give me one single napkin. It was all a little odd.

Last night I dreamed that I had a job at a coffee/doughnut place (I did work at such a place for awhile in high school), and that it was discovered that a male employee had doodled the first name of a female employee along with his own last name. This was seen by all as completely charming, and the woman in question was sought out so we could share the news. But she was not into him. She was nice about it, but she just didn’t feel that way about him, and in fact had a boyfriend. It was sad for us all. Until the guy started ramping it up. You know the way guys sometimes do when they think THEY are following the romantic script precisely and so you ought to be saying YOUR lines. He started getting agitated and mentioning the Friend Zone, and talking about how women SAY they like nice guys but they don’t, and asking her for reasons WHY she didn’t like him (my dude, why do YOU not like EVERY person who gets a crush on YOU?), and comparing himself favorably to the guy she DID like—all signs that things are getting potentially dangerous. I was glad to wake up.

Part of the reason for this dream, I think, is that before I went to bed I overheard William explaining to Rob why he’d decided not to apply to one of the colleges he’d planned to apply to. He (William) had looked the school up in a couple of those guides that tell you what the culture at that school is like, as reported by students. In general he already didn’t like the sound of it: it said that everyone there is into computers or engineering, and everyone studies a lot and then plays video games and not much else, and everything’s very competitive. But then it added that because there are so many more male students than female students, there is a particular term used for women to indicate that they (the women) get very full of themselves because of so much male attention, and that they (the women) start thinking they’re too good for anyone.

Hm. I was immediately pretty clear that this was the male spin on what is happening, and not an accurate one, and furthermore the whole thing sets off multiple red lights for me. Happily for me (I was comfy in my chair and about to head for bed and not in the mood to Explain It to a Man), William was also of this view, and also had an immediate negative reaction to it. He started looking around on other websites (such as a message board for students at that college) to see if there was much backlash about this. For example, was anyone saying “Listen, do the women have any choice here other than (1) accept all male attention indiscriminately or else (2) get labeled this gross term? Are female students allowed to want to study and not date (or to date, but not date these male students)? Is a female student allowed to see differences among people and to have preferences among them and to be attracted to some of them but not others of them (just as men can be attracted to one person but not another), without those personal preferences being considered evidence of how terrible women are in general?”

William could not find evidence of such a view. Rob argued that probably people WERE saying that, or at least thinking it, even if it wasn’t displayed. William felt that if it wasn’t clearly evident wherever the topic was being discussed, that wasn’t a good sign. He also felt it was a bad sign that there didn’t seem to be many women participating in the online groups. I felt like it was a good sign that he was seeing these things as bad signs.

Paul has plenty of things, big and small, that allow me to comfortably participate in any Husbands Are The Worst discussion that might break out in my vicinity. Here is an example of something that is small, and yet it feels to me that it represents something bigger: when he discovered that I had accidentally put a pair of someone else’s clean underwear in his underwear drawer (I don’t fold Paul’s underwear, so I didn’t notice it was the wrong size), he just threw it back into our dirty laundry basket. So then it happened a second time, because I do laundry mostly by room (mine and Paul’s together, Edward and Henry’s together) for easier sorting, so the only sorting/evaluating I’m doing of underwear in my room is “Is this mine or is this Paul’s?,” and that’s mostly an issue of dividing by color and texture. A pair of boys’ underwear is the same color and texture as Paul’s, so into Paul’s drawer it goes. Why would Paul not take the clean pair of underwear and put it into the boys’ drawer? Or even leave it out for me to put into the boys’ drawer? Why PUT IT BACK INTO THE SYSTEM THAT LED TO THE MALFUNCTION?? Why put CLEAN laundry into the DIRTY laundry?

Anyway, marriage is stupid. BUT. I will say this: we have been in this new house for one month now, and I have been basically the worst (moody, moony, dramatic, cranky, sad, slumped, despairing, snapping, and not reaching anywhere near my capacity for unpacking), and he has been consistently and persistently the best. He has gone to work and then come home and worked on fixing things that make me sad: the non-working lock on the bathroom door, the wimpy shower head, the chair that is in the wrong room. On weekends he works on solving larger problems: this weekend he researched salt, sand, salt/sand mixes, salt/sand spreaders, whether my minivan is front-wheel drive, what kind of vehicle we might buy next that would do better with a steep driveway, and what kind of tires might help in the meantime; he also went to the old house, disassembled most of the storage shelves, transported them to the new house, and reassembled them. He has done all of this while remaining cheery, and patting me sympathetically as I mope, and suggesting things such as maybe I would like to go sit in my sunporch for awhile.

When I measured under the wide sill on my sunporch and discovered we had only one set of bookshelves that would tuck beautifully under there, and the set of shelves in question were ones he had just finished filling with books, he took all the books off and moved the shelf—and then it did NOT fit under the sill, because our floors are charmingly uneven, so the sill was 36 inches off the ground where I measured, but 35 inches off the ground at the other end, so then Paul moved the shelf back out and put all the books back on, and he did one (1) sigh about that whole thing and it did not feel like it was aimed in my direction. It was a “welp” sigh.

All of this is to say that Paul has his upsides and strong points, hard as they may be to see when he is, say, reacting to each and every idea I have by saying “Yeah, I thought of that,” or when he is loudly vocalizing his sneezes.

Another thing in his favor is that he fetches my library books every week (I mostly use the online-request system) and also brings me other books that catch his eye that he thinks I might like. This week he brought me Unladylike by Cristen Conger and Caroline Ervin, which, with its strong smash-the-patriarchy theme, feels very supportive and validating coming from a man spouse:

(image from Amazon.com)

I sat on my sunporch and read 97 pages of it yesterday, and I think it’s just great, and it is PACKED with great illustrations, and I think I am going to have to buy my own copy and also pressure others to read/buy it.

I have had two gins, and while I am soberly aware that alcohol is not a long-term solution to anything, I will say that it can take me from panic to non-panic in a pleasingly efficient way. I wanted to find a Dorothy Parker quote I remembered about how people may say many bad things about alcohol but no one denies how effective it is at relieving anxiety, but when I tried to look it up all I found were articles about her unfortunate relationship with alcohol, and that is not quite the note I wanted to strike, so let’s move on. Unless you know the quote, in which case sing out. Perhaps it was not Dorothy Parker? But I was pretty sure it was.

Paul is walking on the treadmill, which is right next to my computer desk, so there is a steady THUMP-THUMP-THUMP sound affecting the composition of this post. We had intended to put the treadmill in another room, but it turned out the charming old ceilings were charmingly low in the intended room, and anyone over 5’10” walking on the treadmill in that room would bonk their head charmingly with every step. Paul is in sock-feet for some reason and he keeps scuffing his socks with a scrape-squeak noise against the treadmill belt; and also he is stepping unnecessarily heavily/loudly, the way it seems to me that men are socialized to feel free to do and women are socialized NOT to feel free to do, and right now it seems to me that this whole situation is an excellent argument against marriage/society in general and men in particular, so perhaps I should revisit my claims about the calming benefits of gin.

Where was I? Oh yes. So, while I am Tipsy Swistle, a lovely version of myself who thinks “Well, why not give the kitchen floor a quick mopping after I do the dishes? It’ll only take a few minutes and it’ll look so much better!” and “Let’s get the coffee pot set up for tomorrow morning so when we wake up we can just press start!” (and also while I am feeling so bolstered by your extremely bolstering variety of comments on the last post), I feel able to make a list of some of the things I like about the new house, to help balance earlier posts. The main downside of doing this is that I don’t see how you will be so patient with my whining/complaining/lamenting/mourning after seeing the list.

• Paul and I now have our own bathroom/shower. In the old house, we and the three littler kids mostly shared one bathroom, and the two older kids mostly shared the other bathroom. It didn’t feel fair (especially when one of the older kids left for college), but that was the way the house was arranged and that was what mostly made sense. Now Paul and I have our own bathroom off our bedroom, and so we never have to deal with kid clothing left on the floor, and the whole sink-counter is for OUR stuff. And in the old house, there was an unsolvable (APPARENTLY) problem of everyone using my bath towel as a hand towel because it was more convenient than using the actual hand towel, so my bath towel was always damp, and that was super annoying as well as exasperating (WHY?? WHY WOULD THEY ALL DO THAT?? Why would they even WANT to dry their hands on SOMEONE’S BATH TOWEL??) and caused me to simmer in resentment, and now that no longer happens and my towel is dry and crisp every morning.

• Also, we have an extra half-bath in this house. Our old house had a full bath and a three-quarters bath; this one has a full bath, a three-quarters bath, and a half-bath. The half-bath is right off the kitchen, which is not ideal, but it is fine—and I’m grateful to the previous owners for adding it (even though there seems to be a weird plumbing issue that makes the downstairs toilet gurgle and drain whenever the upstairs toilet flushes) because otherwise we would always have to go upstairs to use the bathroom.

• I enjoy the feeling of walking from one place to another in this house. It is a big weird house, and it was hard to figure out at first but now I get it, and I like the feeling of knowing how best to get from one part of it to another part of it—and even the feeling of very occasionally going the wrong way, because it reminds me that the house is big and weird, and theoretically I love big weird houses, even though right now the bigness is one of my primary stressors. I like when I need to bring something from one place to another place and I have to sort of LAUNCH OUT on that journey.

• White trim. Home fashions come and go with the phases of the moon, but my old house had medium-dark wood trim everywhere, and medium-dark wood trim is currently out of style, and all the in-style wall colors look right with WHITE trim.

• Many of the kitchen cabinets have shelves that slide out like drawers, and that is indeed very handy and nice. There are also some large shallow drawers perfect for things like plastic wrap and tin foil and baggies. For 17 years I have had my plastic wrap and tin foil and baggies in a narrow deep drawer, and it has resulted in a mild but steady discontent: nearly always needing to dig the roll I want out from under other rolls, and scraping my hand on the sharp cutting-edge of the boxes, and then a roll ends up just sliiightly angled so that it catches the lip of the drawer and prevents me from opening the drawer until I sneak a hand painfully into the drawer and push the roll down. Now everything is in a tidy single-layer row of well-behaved little soldiers.

• We have a view of a portion of river—or at least, we do when it’s winter and the deciduous trees have shed their view-blocking bounty. I am anticipating how interested and invested I will be in my daily view of this river: how happy I might be each winter when I can see it again, how I’ll monitor on a daily basis whether it is frozen/thawed yet, what birds are on it, etc.

• I have mentioned having my own little sunporch room (it was part of the bargain I made with Paul, who wanted so badly to move to this big weird house), and it is a very nice little room and I very much enjoy it. It is a four-season heated sunporch, a little cooler than the rest of the house in cold weather but not MUCH cooler. It is not large, but the smallness makes it feel cozy and manageable. It is big enough for a recliner and a side-table and a bookshelf and a mini-fridge. And it has built-in cabinets, which I use to store snacks and other things that are only mine. And it has a wide sill under all the windows, which I use for plants and decorative items. I put an electric throw blanket in this room, for when it is not quite warm enough, and a regular non-electric throw blanket too, and a framed photo of my wine-and-appetizers friend group, and a set of three little Hello Kitty items I have from childhood, and I am still working on it but in short it’s shaping up very nicely in there.

• The floors are gorgeous. Hardwood, and we had them refinished, and they are just beautiful, and I notice them all the time. They are not the wide-plank kind you sometimes find in old houses (the seller told us they refinished and flipped the wide-plank boards as long as they could, but finally had to replace them), but they’re very pretty.

• Excellent Christmas-decoration potential. The retro big-bulb Christmas lights that looked kind of tacky in our 1959 development house look super awesome and charmingly vintage/retro in this house. And I think colonial-style houses (as this one is) (you probably understood that from context, without that clarification) look especially gorgeous with a candle or wreath in each window, so there’s that to think about for future years.

• HUGE kitchen island. The kitchen design is actually inferior in many ways to our old kludged-together kitchen (we get in each other’s way more in this new kitchen, and the sink/stove/refrigerator are not set up well in relation to each other), but there is a GIANT kitchen island and it is lovely. It collects allllll the clutter, of course. But it is still lovely for all sorts of things. We had the kids’ friends over to decorate gingerbread houses (i.e., graham cracker houses), and there was room for eleven people around it, no problem, we weren’t even bumping elbows. It was also PERFECT for my wine-and-appetizers group: we had room for ALL THE APPETIZERS and ALL THE WINE, and room for all of us to stand around the appetizers and wine!

• I don’t know if it will last, but being in a new house has led to some new chore routines. I had the kids helping me before, but moving to a new house was like hitting a reset button for chore-assigning. I feel less like I’m The Kitchen Drudge, and more like part of a Clean-Up Team. Okay, the main part of the Clean-Up Team. But still.

• I don’t know if it will last, but we eat more often around the table, and that has been nice for change/variety, even though I don’t see it as a Required Family Ideal. Plus, it helps make sure the table is regularly cleared.

• In exercise news, I go up and down stairs so many more times per day, and also I walk to more places, and I walk with the kids to and/or from school. Plus, just walking around the house in a normal way is much further than walking around our old house in a normal way. The move resulted in me finding my long-lost FitBit, so I can see the clear difference in steps.

• The previous homeowner left behind all the custom curtains, and I like almost all of them. One room has black-and-white toile. Another has gold-cord-trimmed green/gold/wine tapestry. Another has a plain beige you’d think would be boring, but they seem perfect for the room they’re in, and the fabric looks so cozy/nice/quality, and the shape of the curtains is pretty.

• There is a ton of storage space. I am overwhelmed right now with where to put things because few of the storage spaces correspond to what we used to have, and not all of the storage lines up with the kind of storage we need, and a lot of the storage is unheated space up a teetery flight of stairs—but there is still quite a bit of it. This past weekend I unloaded all our cocktail glasses and wine glasses and shot glasses and vases and out-of-season mugs into the cabinets in the bonus kitchenette, and there was still room left over.

• Have I mentioned the bonus kitchenette? In the room we’re currently using as a sort of sitting room / library, there is a little corner kitchenette/bar. There is just enough room for one person to stand in it. It has some cupboards, a small sink, a dishwasher, a small microwave, a little bit of countertop, and room for a mini fridge. It also has shelves for wine/liquor, and ceiling racks for suspending wine glasses upside-down over your head.

• Pretty views out most of the windows. We’d looked at another large old house we liked, but the land all around it had been sold off and used for condos, so the views out every window (including in a large gorgeous sunroom with floor-to-ceiling windows) were Packed With Condo. Not the case at our house.

• A really nice amount of pretty sunlight. Let’s see how I feel about that in summer—but in winter, it is really nice, and heartening. Most of the day I can find a sunny place to sit.

• Our bedroom is nice and warm. The heat in the house is very irregular, but our room is toasty even when we close the heating vents. It gets a ton of sun during the day, which helps. (Again, let’s talk again in summertime.)

• We keep being pleasantly surprised by how many zones/areas there are in the house. When we had the kids’ friends over to decorate gingerbread (graham cracker) houses, kids broke off in groups after the decorating was over, and there were THREE groups of friends hanging out in three different parts of the house, but Paul and I still had a living room to sit in, and Rob could still sit at his laptop in the dining room, and we could barely even HEAR the friend groups.

• The ceilings may not all be of ideal height, and they may not be even, and they may be cracking fresh cracks with every passing day, but they are not popcorn ceilings. I didn’t know I was supposed to dislike popcorn ceilings until I watched HGTV in the waiting room three times a week while William got physical therapy on his knee a few years ago. But now that I have been taught to notice, I notice. Our old house was built in 1959 and had all popcorn ceilings.

• I may have to think twice before hanging up anything on the horsehair plaster walls, and they may be bristling with fresh cracks with every passing day, and the paint may already be peeling a little in the bathroom, making me nervous that it was painted quickly and not correctly—but at least they are all freshly-painted in colors I find pleasant! And all the trim and all the built-ins are painted in a pleasing vintage-looking white.

• Cool doorknobs throughout. Some of those cool old cut-glass ones, and some cool old ceramic ones. Wobbly, of course, but we won’t dwell on it.

• There’s a propane fireplace in the living room and I love it. I just love it. It is pretty, and it is easy, and it is cozy, and it is relaxing to gaze at, and it is warm, and it makes it possible to have one room extra-warm without having to increase the heat in the whole entire house. (The propane fireplace is one of the things Paul would like to remove. I will resist yea even unto death.)

• OUTLETS FOR MILES. Sure, it turns out some of them were wired backwards by an amateur who thought he could just do this for fun—but bygones. (I can say “bygones” in that peaceful way because we found out about the wiring/outlets at the inspection, and the seller agreed to give us a credit for them all to be fixed.) The point is that if I am in my personal sunporch room and I want to plug in an electric throw and also a phone charger and also a reading lamp and also a glitter lava lamp, I can. This was not typical of the old houses we toured, some of which had verrrrrry sketchy/sparse electrical situations.

• The cats, after an initial period of adjustment, seem to LOVE it here. They were having some territorial disputes at the old house; this house, with more square footage and more separate areas and lots of alternate/escape routes, seems to help with that quite a bit. And there are still more areas we can open up to them if we put cat-flaps in some of the doors. Plus there are so many sunny spots. Plus they can hear the mice in the ceiling and they find that mentally stimulating.

• Heat-lights in two of the bathrooms. I love them. Perhaps one bathroom fan makes unendurable squealing noises and both bathroom fans vent to the attic instead of to the outdoors (??? WHY ???), but at least there are heat-lights!

• There are Interesting Details EVERYWHERE. Our old house was the kind that gets mass-produced as part of a large neighborhood, and everything was standard and builder’s-grade. This new house has been around for two hundred years and has been altered a number of times, and there is a ton to look at and admire and wonder about. Ceiling height varies considerably. Window height and style varies considerably. Some doors have interesting old locks, and we have a big box of jumbled keys. A number of rooms are a step down or a step up from other rooms. There’s a back stairway. There’s an old room that used to be the kitchen but is now a laundry room with a bunch of very useful old kitchen cabinets. There are bricked-up fireplaces. There are a few old built-in cupboards around the corner from the recently-updated kitchen. There’s an ancient peeling cabinet in the mudroom, with an ancient herb-grinder in it and some more-recent herb-drying dowels over it. There’s a weird little hallway between two rooms, and in that hallway is a sink and mirror. There’s a door in our bedroom closet that leads to another room. More than one person, upon touring the house, has said some version of “Now my house feels so boring!” Boring is not something I have minded about our old house, but interesting is fun in its own way.

• Good neighborhood situation. We’re on a busy street, which is not ideal, but right behind our house is a whole network of interesting and not at all busy streets. Lots of people walking dogs, hardly any cars. Lots of hills and little deadend streets and pretty wooded areas and an interesting mix of older/newer houses to look at, and an official walking trail through one of the pretty wooded areas. Plus we’re within five minutes’ walk of the center of town, with restaurants and a bar and the library and the post office and the place William works and some interesting little shops. And if I need to be in two places at once, the kids can walk home from school by themselves (it still makes me Very Very Nervous because I am not used to it, but in time I hope to be completely blasé).

• The driveway is hellishly steep and, right now, in the wake of a new move and the aftermath of discovering that a dusting of fluffy snow keeps me from driving up it and that I can’t really use the garage either, feels like a personal rejection by the house of me and of my minivan—but the driveway is LARGE. You don’t have to worry about having a lot of friends over (as long as it’s not winter): there is enough space for the cars. And it doesn’t snow year-round. And one day I may not be driving a minivan. And I might be able to do something about the tires in the meantime.

• China cabinets, plural. Long have I wanted a china cabinet, and now I have TWO. One is a corner cabinet in the kitchen, which I will use to display pretty things such as my pink Pyrex bowls, and the mug I bought because it was so beautiful but it is so uncomfortable to hold. The other is a more practical cabinet tucked away where no one sees it—except someone coming and going from a personal little sunporch room. I have put my grandmother’s china in that cabinet, and so I see it every day instead of once a year when I take it out for Thanksgiving. And there is plenty of room for more pieces, if I want to add some.

Today’s mood: “No, seriously: let’s stop unpacking at this point; let’s get the old house thoroughly cleaned and get the floors refinished and the ceilings/walls painted, and then let’s move back.” (What if I never DO adjust to this move, because it WAS IN FACT the wrong decision and I ACTUALLY DON’T want to live here? WHAT THEN??)

Tell you what: let’s talk about something other than my house panic. … … … I can’t think of a single thing. I have been sitting here listening to the clock tick for five minutes and I’ve got nothing.

Paul loves the house. He’s happy with it and keeps comparing it favorably to the old house. I think he’s worried too about what if I never really want to live here. Meanwhile I am wondering things like could we just keep both houses and I’ll live in the old one and he could live in this one? Because right now it seems like one of us is going to be miserable wherever we try to live. Or maybe not! Maybe one year from now I’ll re-read this post and think, “Wow, I barely even remember this!” Or maybe he’ll spend a year here and say, “You know what, I’ve tried that now and I’m done with it.” And we’ll lose a lot of money buying our old house back from the buyers (assuming we ever find buyers), who will have changed things important to us, and painted it ugly colors, and probably cut down the tree my dad planted when Henry was born. And we’ll never be able to sell this house, because who other than us would be suckers enough to buy it?

I haven’t thrown away our old address labels yet.

I feel like we shouldn’t have moved the kids: now we’ve lost that feeling they could have had about coming back to their childhood home as adults. And we’ve nearly guaranteed ourselves another move in the future, because this house would not be a good one to grow old in. This house would be a good one to break a hip in, or to fall down the basement stairs in and not be found for several days. So then we’ll have another move, and a house the kids have never even lived in. Our old house would have been a pretty good one to grow old in.

And really the only reason I even started looking at real estate listings is that I wanted a garage, and our old house (a raised ranch) was not a design that works well or looks right with a garage, and it seemed like it might be cheaper/better to move to a house with a garage rather than try to force-add a garage. AND THEN THIS HOUSE DOESN’T EVEN REALLY HAVE A GARAGE. I mean, it does, but it’s a one-car, and it’s far from the kitchen so it’s not great for bringing in the shopping, and the minivan fits so snugly I have to turn sideways to walk past. And Paul bought a new upright freezer and it was too big to fit through the door of the house so it had to go into the garage—but if the minivan’s parked in there, we can’t really get to the freezer. And our driveway is so hellishly steep, when there was just a dusting of fluffy snow I couldn’t get the minivan up it. THIS WAS ALL A TERRIBLE MISTAKE AND I WANT A DETAILED DO-OVER.

After I wrote about anticipating a post-holiday crash, the crash occurred—or possibly it was not a post-holiday crash but only another house/move-related crash, happening by chance in the post-holiday time. I will summarize for posterity: lots of thoughts such as “If Paul were to die suddenly in a car accident [*performs superstitious ritual to keep words from suddenly/magically manifesting as reality*], I would IMMEDIATELY sell this house and move back to the other one”—and then sort of daydreaming about that, instead of recoiling in horror. Or, similarly, experiencing one of my sudden usual fearful feelings about dying in a car accident myself, and then thinking sort of optimistically that the upside would be that I wouldn’t have to deal with the house/move anymore.

People who say “Trust your gut!” aren’t dealing with the same gut a lot of us have, are they? Because MY gut says “OH MY GOD THIS IS A DISASTER, YOU HAVE RUINED YOUR LIFE, SELL AT A LOSS IF YOU HAVE TO AND GET BACK TO YOUR DEAR DEAR OLD HOUSE WHERE EVERYTHING IS FAMILIAR!!!” But my gut said something very, very similar when I sent Rob to kindergarten (“OH MY GOD THIS IS A DISASTER, YOU HAVE RUINED YOUR LIFE AND ALSO HIS, THIS IS NOT NATURAL, HOMESCHOOL HIM EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE AN IMPATIENT AND INCONSISTENT PERSON WHO HATES TEACHING AND SHOWS NEITHER GIFT NOR INCLINATION FOR IT!!!”) and when I dropped Rob off at college (“OH MY GOD THIS IS A DISASTER, YOU HAVE RUINED YOUR LIFE AND HIS, GO BACK AND GET HIM RIGHT NOW AND BRING HIM HOME OR HE WILL DIE OF STARVATION/COLD/LONELINESS!!!”), and has also done so basically every time I have encountered any major life change, including when I weaned each baby, and when I sent each baby to school, and when I got a new artificial Christmas tree, and when I got rid of our old recliner, and when I replaced our old quilt, and when I didn’t notice until I got home that the grocery store charged me $4.69/lb for fresh ginger instead of $1.99/lb for red grapes. Probably also when we bought our old house, though it’s hard to remember that now, looking back on it.

Today is back to normal. My gut is still panicking, but it’s at the usual levels instead of the spiked ones: I’m back to my “the jury is still out”/”either way it’s an interesting experiment!” panic-overriding feeling, rather than sitting morosely in a chair thinking about all the reasons this was a terrible mistake.

Also, Paul fixed the ice machine in the door of the fridge. The breaking of the ice machine may have been one of the things that pushed me off the cliff, since the ice machine was one of the few things I was feeling routinely happy about, and then it broke. Paul kept looking online and then trying things, and then looking online again and trying other things, and today the ice machine is making and crushing ice again. He also fixed two of the non-locking bathroom doors, so that now they lock. And he fixed a hinge that was threatening to let our entire bathroom door fall off. And he replaced a doorknob that kept not quite latching. If he keeps fixing things, I’m going to have to stop wailing “And neither of us is HANDY!!” when I tell the story of why my new house might be a terrible mistake.

Also, I went to Target with a couple of the kids to get some boring stuff, and Christmas candy was 70% off, so now I have a whole bunch of candy and cookies tucked into the cabinet in my own personal sunporch room.

Also, as I was doing some sullen packing/unpacking, I came across two new electric throw blankets, purchased on clearance last year and put aside in case they were needed to replace Edward’s electric throw blanket, which he loves and uses all the time so I like to have back-ups. I let one of the blankets continue on its lifepath as a back-up, but opened up the other one and put it in my own personal sunporch room. And some long-sleeved shirts and sweaters arrived, and I ordered some more. And I found my wool socks.

And tonight is New Year’s Eve, so we will have all the snacks including pizza rolls and Pringles and egg rolls and chocolate-covered pretzels, and one of us (me) will have champagne, and that’s a heartening thought.

Well! I don’t know about you, but I am bracing for the post-holiday crash. I can usually coast for a week with New Year’s Eve to look forward to, and the pretty Christmas lights still up, and choosing the new calendars, and some fun clearances, and feeling as if it’s still legit to use the Christmas dishes—but after that it’s anyone’s guess. I wonder if next year I should save an advent calendar and start opening the little doors AFTER Christmas.

We are still here in the new house. I changed the light bulbs in our bathroom so now the cabinet doors don’t scrape them. Paul discovered that the unenthusiastic shower heads had filters inside them that needed to be changed, and now the shower heads are great (but why are there filters in the shower heads at all?). It’s three times as far to the grocery store now. The new house is so much more expensive to heat, and I’m always cold. I’m getting used to where things are in the kitchen, and cooking isn’t so much mental effort. It’s pleasing to walk the kids to/from school, and William can walk to work now.

I try to avoid thinking about the change, because thinking about it makes me feel panicky and queasy; I’m hoping that the adjustment will happen automatically with time if I pretend not to notice. There are a lot of things to love about this house if I can stop pining for the old house and panicking about this one.