MY HOUSE DIVORCE

It used to be a nice house. It was clean, sunny and roomy. It had a big back yard that I could plant lots of trees and shrubs. The grass was green and the fences weren’t crumbling. The citrus trees in our yard had oranges and grapefruit in the winter. I grew vegetables and flowers.


My daughter loved the pool , which my husband took care of. I thought I would never move, outgrow it or have to care for it entirely myself.

My daughter took her first steps in this house. Marks on the garage wall show her growth. Her various playmates passed through with birthday parties, sleep-overs, speech practices and later anime conventions. Her friends would come over, wreck things and leave. A population of Barbies, then Neopets took over her room. Her drawings were strewn everywhere. Life permeated the walls and even juice when Melissa had a fit and flung her cup. Stains on the carpet evidenced one of her art projects.



Growth Hashmarks on the Garage Wall

 But the house wasn’t that easy to keep clean and I am a lazy housekeeper. It had 2,400 square feet of floor to get dirty. Our cat shed fur and occasionally puked on the rug. As he got older he added urine to the mix. Pet birds contributed seeds, poop and feathers in amounts way beyond their size. They weren’t happy confined in their cages, so they had a whole room to fly around and pollute. Cleaning their cages and her room was not a priority with my daughter.


Then the house relationship died one day. I sat at the dining room table with my husband when he told me the relationship wasn’t working anymore. My world caved in and things were never the same. I got profoundly depressed. I was left with all his junk and I had to purge it.

His photos came down, the marriage certificate was shredded, but I still had his ugly office furniture and law books. Looking at this stuff was a slap in the face. The detritus of thirty-two years of marriage weighed me. My love affair with the house was over.

I loved growing things, but weeding, trimming bushes and sawing limbs was a chore. I planted native plants thinking that they wouldn’t need a lot a water, but I was wrong. The sprinkler system didn’t cover most of what I had planted so I had to drag a soaker hose around the yard and water something almost every day in the summer. When my husband left, I didn’t want to mow grass and pay for the water, so I let the grass die. This resulted in bushes in the lawn dying and dropping their leaves in the pool. The yard looked sad. It reflected on my failure to maintain it and in my life in general.

The pool was difficult to keep up. The water had to be tested for acidity and chlorine content. The sand filter clogged up and cleaning it was a pain. The pool was a leaf magnet. The skimmer never seemed to work well. Water would have to be added every other day in the summer. It wasn’t so bad when my husband was around to take care of it, but I had no idea what to do when he left.

When my husband divorced me, my thought was to sell the house. My daughter didn’t want to live anywhere else, so I held off putting it on the market. At the time it had equity. Then the market crashed and it lost half of its inflated value. I owed more than what it was worth. I didn’t know what to do.

I still wanted sell the house, so I slowly got rid of stuff, especially if it was my ex’s. I felt a small triumph when something was gone.

I bided my time and cursed the pool. The damn machinery kept breaking down and turning the water green with algae. I had to sink money into something that I hated. The air conditioning broke down in June and I had to replace it. I wanted out.

The market continued to plunge. Every year the “experts” said the market would improve and it didn’t. I looked at options including defaulting on the mortgage. I felt trapped.

My daughter left for college. The house was even emptier. It felt weird to be totally alone for long periods of time. Sometimes I didn’t have any human contact for days. The only sound in the house would be the television or the pet birds.

I finally put the house on the market this year, a step towards my goal of moving on in my life. Selling it was tricky with it being worth less than I owed on it. I didn’t know where I was going to live, other than in the same neighborhood. I knew I didn’t want a pool. I didn’t know if the bank would even approve a short sale or if they would sue me for the difference. All kinds of legal issues accompanied a short sale.

I got lucky with a getting a buyer right away. A neighbor offered to buy it before it was officially listed. The bank approved the sale in a week. Everything happened very fast. I just had to find a place to live after nineteen years in the same place.

Looking at rental houses left me cold. What were some of these people thinking? One promised a brand new kitchen with granite counter tops, but left other areas in the house unfinished. Another had a neighbor with ten cars in the yard and a pile of tires in the back yard. One didn’t look bad except the house across the street had it stucco stripped off and a motor cycle parked in front. I had visions of motorcycle noise at three in the morning and loud parties. I didn’t feel safe there.

I finally found one I liked, but it was farther than I wanted to travel for almost everything. I had no other good choices, though. It was about 1500 square feet-less floor to clean. It looked like the other tile roofed variations on the same model, crammed together with tiny yards. I used to turn my nose up at these types of houses. Now it suited my needs, No huge yard, no pool and a garage to put my crap in. It was clean and neat and I wasn’t in charge of yard upkeep.

Still, I wondered... did I want to be in this house for a year? Can I pay the rent? Am I ever going to be comfortable in it? It came down to no time left to look for another place or no other options, so I took it.

When you live in a place a long time, little tendrils of memories worm their way into your mind. As much as I wanted out, it was still wrenching to leave. I felt like a plant being repotted that had roots being ripped from the clay surface of its container. I felt unhinged, uncomfortable, insecure and uneasy.

Since the divorce I had been getting rid of things. Now it started in earnest. I had no idea how much stuff I had until I started packing it. I had the Salvation Army take my ex’s ugly fake wood grain plastic office furniture predating the seventies. A neighbor helped haul away patio furniture, a grill and assorted other junk. It still wasn’t enough. I gave up and just packed the items I didn’t want. The weight of all the accumulation of things oppressed me. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the lawn spreader ,a wheel barrel and four bikes.

The amount of packing was enormous. I had moved before, but never by myself and never packing everything. I would wake up at night in a panic and would have to calm myself down. Anxiety ate at me. I couldn’t relax. If I got tired, I couldn’t rest because something else had to be done. My life had been taken over by moving hell. Boxes were scattered around the house, but just as much stuff was laying around loose. I had twenty paintings and no where to put them. Where does all this crap come from? It snuck in when I wasn’t looking and before long, it took over. Despair overcame me at times.

Moving day came. I was packing up until the time that the truck was nearly loaded. These guys were carrying my life out the door. Somehow they managed to knock a door knob off a door in the hallway. They couldn’t get a couch out the door of a room. It got in the door, why couldn’t it go out? I had to leave it for now. I was too tired to fight about it.

With all the going in and out, I was hot and sweaty the whole day. My body wanted to go exercise, not pack and stress out. My muscles were shaky and weak.

I drove to the new place and put my pet birds away. The movers hadn’t shown up yet. I think they had gone out to lunch or something. The house had a smaller square footage and I wasn’t sure where I was going to put everything. I found out that cramming houses close together makes for darker rooms because sunlight is blocked.

The movers came back. Everything didn’t fit. I had to put my weight machine in the garage. An old entertainment center looked too big for its space. My office furniture barely fit in the room. Boxes were everywhere. I had no cable yet, so I felt lost. No computer, no T.V. I was uncomfortable. The movers left after I paid them a large amount of money. I wondered if I was supposed to tip them.

I couldn’t find anything. I had marked the boxes with the room where they were supposed to be and what was in them, but the movers had not read some of the labels. I found my kitchen pots half a day later. So much stuff was laying around. It didn’t feel like a home. I was exhausted and couldn’t face unpacking the boxes. I got out what I really needed and ignored the rest.

The next day the cable guy came. I felt much better. At least I wasn’t disconnected from the world. The thought of organizing and reconnecting all the wires myself had worried me a great deal. A little normalcy was restored, though I still felt very unsettled.

The old house hadn’t closed yet, so it was still my responsibility. Some church ladies volunteered to help and cleaned out the debris left behind. A neighbor helped get the couch to my new place. I gradually got the stuff I had left behind. It didn’t feel finished, though. I still had to worry about the yard and the pool. The emptiness echoes inside when I was there. It’s a skeleton of what it was, the soul vanished.

The pool decided to turn green. I ran out of chemicals. I tried to back wash it and it didn’t help. I desperately wanted to be done with the frustration forever.

On one of my visits, a hummingbird reproached me with his beady little eyes and raspy call about the empty feeder. It was so unspeakably sad that I felt like crying for hours. I was surprised with the strength of my emotional reaction. It was like a dream where a subconscious feeling comes out and I wake up with the shock of it still lingering in my mind. An unbidden sense of mourning, loss and abandonment had assaulted me.

The once pretty yard looked dried up. I ran the sprinkler system, but it didn’t water every plant. I worried about the unique native plants not typically found in Phoenix suburban yards. They were my babies. I will miss them.

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On October 9, 2012, the house officially sold. I will not to have to worry about it anymore. My plants will probably die and the hummingbirds will be unhappy, but it is out of my control. I try not to think about it and feel guilty. When I have a goal, the difficulties involved to achieve it can surpass what I ever anticipated. Even though I really wanted to sell the house, like any divorce, the emotional entanglement was difficult to sever.