Of mice and little men

Right after I managed to extract myself from what I refer to as My Year Long Learning Experience Relationship with the biggest liar I have ever met, (never trust a man who tells you he is 30 and then three months into the relationship, when you take a peek at his license, you find out he is really FORTY, and then, seven months in you find out not only is he NOT single, he hasn’t even started the divorce process with his wife yet. But he could be charming and was a pretty good dancer…) I needed a place to live, something cheap and ready to move into. My mother had just purchased a house to use as a rental property, so I moved right on in.

It is a little Cape Cod style house, that I called the Mouse House. My mother thought it was because it was small like a mouse house, but I meant it was because Mickey and Minnie built it in 1968 and were too cheap to do any maintenance until they sold it to her in 2002. The insulation, as it apparently will do if improperly installed, had slid down the space between the studs, leaving hollow areas in the walls. That would not have been a big deal, except this happened to all the walls, including exterior ones. The result was the bedroom was so cold in the winter that if you licked the wall your tongue would stick.

The place had “radiant heat”. I put it in quotes because there was nothing “heat” like about it. I had a bunch of space heaters to keep me from getting hypothermia in my sleep. The way radiant heat used to be done, back when Mickey and Minnie had their dream cottage slapped together, was to install copper piping directly into a concrete slab and then erect the house. The main problem with this is that the acids in cement dissolve copper over time. Who knew? The result in the Mouse House was two warm patches in the floor, one on the bathroom, and the other in the kitchen, right by the stove. How convenient! The central heating only works in the two rooms you can warm by other methods; one by, obviously, running a bath, and the other by turning on a stove. Needless to mention, as soon as I could, I was outta there.

In my new house, where my DH and sweetly scrumptious babies all live, is of the late 1960’s/early 1970’s split level variety, with the windows jammed right into the corners of the rooms. Have you seen the like? It’s okay inside, because it makes the rooms brighter, but from the outside those windows look totally retarded. AND I hate, hate, HATE it when people put shutters on this style home. It means you get some windows with only one shutter! Number one, shutters nowadays are not functional, but decorative, so they are superfluous, and number two, why put up a decorative accident that is completely off balance and asymmetrical? That's not decorating, it's grating.

Anyway, in this house I have hardwood floors and what Americans call area rugs, and the English call carpets. To the English, a rug is something you take on a picnic to sit on, or use to wrap around yourself in front of a fire. You know, what Americans call blankets. With that cleared up; the carpet downstairs is dark and linty, and therefore no good at all for changing a baby. The lint sticks in the zinc ointment and it looks like my infant has pubic hair. It’s quite disturbing. But I like the classic look of hardwood, and it's much easier to keep clean than that wall to wall stuff.

A friend, from my days on Planet Zoom, and I were talking about moving, and how it is such a drag and now that we have babies we are very hesitant to move house unless totally necessary, and blah blah. I mentioned I have moved 20 plus times, and have lived in three countries, three major cities, 9 different apartments and 7 houses. She has only lived on Planet Zoom and now she lives in Nebraska. She was flabbergasted. It was quite interesting to see her flabber gasting right before my eyes; I should have taken a photo.

I used to be able to just live anywhere; I could move in with my two green suitcases of clothes and skin care products and snuggle in for the three moths or three years or whatever length of my tenure happened to be. But now...the game has different rules. I read a blog recently where the new mama was commenting on how she knows it will never again be “just her”. I can relate completely. My twins are not temporarily in my care, to be returned to their rightful owners at some future date. They are not interesting pets. They are my CHILDREN, fruit of body, and I will forever be their mother. Forever will I have a part of me crawling, walking, driving, living, existing separate from the main body, but oh, so closely and intimately connected. I will never again be my own woman alone, or my own woman and wife, but forever I am to be my own woman, a wife AND a Mother of Twins. For the first time, I have daydreams about settling down in one spot, maybe for years and years.

To fuel the dream, I have started a garden, complete with overpriced herbaceous peonies, lilies, butterfly bushes, forsythia, clematis vines, rose bushes and crimson Barberries in the front, under my jammed-in-the-corner windows. I even planted a tree for each baby as soon as I knew I was to have twins. Baby A has a Carolina Silverbell and Baby B has a Japanese Lilac, or as my mother would put it “A lovely Syringa reticulate.” She’s big on Latin names. I am hesitant to move now because I have an emotional attachment to those two trees. (As well as a healthy financial investment in the peonies – some of them are absurdly expensive….)

“My, my!” The old gang from Planet Zoom would comment, “How you have changed!” Yes, my dears, no longer do I flit, or float or fleetly flee or fly. I may be here to stay.