Housing around

(Note - this is the second installment of the story. To read the first, go to the post immediately below titled "a vitch, ghost and a mumma."



Her days started at 6 a.m. when she forced herself out of bed to take the dogs out for a walk along the beach. It was as much for her own sanity as to get him exercise. Those were a few precious moments to churn over the frustrations, demands and disappointments of her life. Back at home it was a massive rush to get everyone dressed, fed, packed up and out the door. This year it was worse than it had ever been – every kid went to a different place. Thomas was at the middle school, Jack went to the new elementary school, Julie was at the old elementary school and Amanda went to nursery school on Tuesdays, Thursdays and every other Wednesday. The start times were staggered, but not enough to accommodate the mad dash across town and the long rows of traffic backed up along poorly designed drop-off area of the new school, which started after the Middle School and but before the old Elementary School.
Either someone hadn’t taken the time to think through the number of cars that would need to be in the same spot within the 15 minutes of the school building opening and school starting, or they did and didn’t care. Negligence or outright abuse? Regardless, the perplexing problem kept busy three separate school committees, a subcommittee of the PTA and a panel of the Board of Selectmen.
Emma was sure her children would be grown before the problem was solved.
For now, she and 328 other parents had to cope with a pick up that was worse than the drop off. At least in the morning, the kids could get out of the car as soon as it stopped and then off it went. At the end of the day, the cars sat and waited and waited and waited for children who came out in random order. It was complete pandemonium on rainy days when umbrellas and rain boots were added to the mix.
After school was a flurry of bouncing about from one activity to another. The growing list included football practice, soccer practice, dance lessons, figure skating lessons, basketball, Cub Scouts, Karate, gymnastics and play dates. It required a very detailed calendar and an extensive network of like-minded parents.
Emma was one of those rare people who would take people up on their offers to help. She warned them not to offer if they didn’t really mean it. Still, someone were taken by surprise.
It was an extraordinarily ordinary life. It was the sort of life a foreign correspondent living alone on the war zone in Kazikstan would have longed for. Emma’s husband, John Thomas, thought she was awesome. He had rearranged his schedule so he could come home by 5 p.m. three nights of week to cook and he organized “Adventures with Dad” Saturdays to give her a break at least once a month.
Things were busy bordering on insanely hectic so it made no sense to even entertain the thought about that big Victorian on the corner with the incredible water views. No sense at all.
They had a house. A nice house. Admittedly a little crammed with four kids, two dogs and four gold fish, but still a nice house. The chimney needed work. The front porch was sagging, but the roof was practically new.
John Thomas broached the topic carefully.
“You’re not interested in that old Victorian down the street, right?” he said from bed as Emma brushed her teeth in the bathroom off the bedroom.
“That one where the old crazy guy has been holed up for a couple of decades? The one with the broken windows on the third floor?” she said.
Emma glanced around at the towels on the floor, the children’s socks in the corner, the crud that had collected behind the toilet seat, the q-tips stuffed under the radiator. She had intended to clean it all early but got distracted with a phone call from her sister, three trips back and forth from the school, cooking two meals, running to the market for a gallon of milk and a stop at the library to return seven over due books. “Don’t you think that would take a lot of work?”
“Aren’t you the won who always says the more you try to do, the more you do?” he said. “Besides, it would have enough rooms for everyone to have their own place and you could have a real studio.”
A real studio. A quiet place to work. A place filled with backdrops and permanent lighting. A waiting area for clients. No children’s toys, no children. Very tempting.

A Vitch a Ghost and a Mummy

Emma Lowell conditioned her hair with shampoo for three days before she realized that she had bought two bottles of shampoo instead of one each. She had a system: shampoo on the left, conditioner on the right.
For three days she picked up the bottle on the right, saw that it was shampoo and fumed about the kids carelessly, or worse, purposefully, switching them. It would have been funny if it wasn’t going to take another three days or more before she would both go to the store and remember when she was there that she needed conditioner.
This is exactly the life she was determined starting around age 14 to avoid. She assiduously planned to become a foreign correspondent dashing off to exotic lands to report on crucial stories. No husband, no children, no boring PTA meetings. And yet, here she was living in a small town in New England organizing a car pool and teaching Sunday School to four-year-olds.
It tedious. It was demanding. It was filled with challenges that she never imagined. Managing the budding career of a six-year-old soccer playing ballerina. Navigating the grocery store with a sneaky two-year-old randomly tossing into the cart Hohos, toilet paper and cans of beans. Ensuring that the middle school’s only quarterback arrived at god awfully early morning games in the wilds of suburban Massachusetts guided only by directions that are completely wrong. Convincing a pre-pre adolescent that reading really is more fun than video games.
Maybe late night parties and lunch with dignitaries and getting shot at by rebel forces would have been more fun, but Emma had a dishwasher, microwave and washing machine. And at the end of the day, she was showered with sweet hugs and kisses.
When she had time, Emma ran a small business taking photographs of prized pets, but she didn’t have much time. Most of her energy went into maintaining some semblance of organization in her house while feeding, nursing, ferrying, entertaining and generally loving her four children. There weren’t supposed to be so many, it just sort of happened. Once they got started, it seemed more natural to have babies around than not.
Thomas was the first. Now 11, he was athletic and intense. He was the captain of team and yet he had an underlying sense of silliness. He was often dragging his brother into playing practical jokes on the family and unsuspecting friends. Not that nine-year-old Jack needed much dragging. He had a solid sense of humor himself and hoped one day to be comedian/magician like the one who came to his friend’s birthday party and blew rubber doughnuts out of his nose.
Julia, about to turn seven, seemed to have inherited all the seriousness that skipped over her two older brothers. In second grade, she was reading on a fourth grade level and very proud of it. She was sure she would be a doctor when she grew up, or a figure skater.
Just barely three-year-old Amanda was full of surprises, starting with the fact that she was here at all. Her parents were all set with three rambunctious children, but apparently Amanda didn’t want to be left out of the fun. Somebody miscounted something or lost count of something and the very day Emma finally decided to send the crib off to charity, she found out she still needed it.
They were individually and collectively more fun, insightful, thought provoking and delightful than Emma had ever expected.