A month or so ago, my mother was driving Lil E and I the ten blocks from her house to our place. Instead of the direct route, passing quickly into the next neighborhood over, we wound around a bit through the blocks surrounding my childhood home.
"I want to show you a house that's for sale over a block or two," she said, steering us up the curvy street alongside the expressway and then up one more. "It isn't pretty, but it is the kind of house I can see you and Bruce and Lil E living in, the kind you should buy."
This is a game I know well. It began with Bruce and I walking from beautiful, tree-lined block to quiet, residential block when we moved into Old Irving Park seven years ago. We fell in love with our neighborhood. We took walks on the weekend, longing for a Starbucks to pop up (or anywhere, really, with a decent cup of coffee on a Sunday afternoon) and pointing out dream houses along the way.
Sometimes it was a deliberate game: If you could choose any of these seven houses to live in, which would you make your own?
Sometimes a random spin: Pick a number from one to ten, count the houses. For manse or fixer-upper, your number is your house!
Most often it was an extrapolated dream to turn an anonymous house into our own little nest: If you bought this house, what is the first thing you would do? Update the windows? Paint the door red? Pull the ground cover off of the strangled snapdragons? Mow the lawn?
We'd make plans that might seem artificial as people writing rent checks every month, but each of those games, far-fetched plans and fantasies (Is it totally in the clouds to think some older couple might be seeking out a nice young couple to have their home and treat it well? Is that crazy?) was a little bit of hope for our future together.
There came a time when we got more serious. We were both working and earning a decent living, both ready for the next level. We started going to open houses, taking mental notes of listings and talking to friends who were brokers and agents about how to proceed with our plans to make ourselves at home in our neighborhood.
We were appalled at the price of a house, even a house that needed more love than we could give, more work than we imagined we could do, more loans than we could ever arrange. Still, we kept on. We talked about neighboring areas with hope that the elevated market within our own boundaries would eventually bleed over.
And then, our committment split. Taking it to the next level for me meant buying a house. The next level for Bruce meant getting married. We couldn't do both.
One night, while the song Slide played in the background of our conversation as we drove around Old
Irving Park in our Saturn, Bruce made an impassioned plea to me.
"If it is a choice between where we live and how we spend the rest of our lives together," he said to me, "I choose to get married. I want to get married."
I remember the radio playing perfectly on cue at that moment.
And Ill do anything you ever
Dreamed to be complete
Little pieces of the nothing that fall
Oh,may put your arms around me
What you feel is what you are
And what you are is beautiful
Oh,may do you wanna get married
Or run away
I wanna wake up where you are
I wont say anything at all...
It all just seemed so clear, as it does when the man you are madly in love with tells you that marrying you is the most important thing in the world to him. I filed away all my notes and made room for bridal magazines and binders of different, new big ideas.
We put that song on the wedding CD we gave as favors at our reception. Bruce was right, and we found a home together in another tiny, vintage apartment, right across the street from our old place. And then life happened in the crazy, unpredictable, planned out, wonderful way it does. I got laid off and we decided I would pursue a job I loved. We made that decision together, choosing to have a relationship made up of two happy, healthy people rather than two incomes. Halving our earnings meant putting aside our dreams of having a home, but we didn't let it interfere with what felt like bigger plans. And so we had Lil E.
Now we've lived in this lovely neighborhood for seven years, been married for four, been a family of three for a bit more than two. I have a career in bloom and we finally have a handle on all those medical bills from bringing our boy into the world and a year of seeing lots of specialists under a PPO plan. Now we are trying (trying, trying) to rebuild our savings account and get our financial neglect in order. Now we are trying to pull our focus back from the week to week and month to month to the much bigger picture. Now, I am ready to return to chasing the dream that ends with keys to a house.
Now, the picture of the perfect house in my head is not as perfect as it once was. It needs work, needs love, has a room where another baby sleeps, has an office where I can shut the door and work peacefully, has a yard for us all to play in, has a space for Bruce to call his own, is a home where we can paint and dance and stretch our arms and legs freely.
My mother understands this. It is a lot like the story about how she and my father found a way to buy their bungalow in the summer of 1978. They hated to leave their apartment in Lincoln Park, but more than that, they wanted more for their family, for themselves. And now, ten blocks away from where they planted us, Bruce and I have wondered, worried, analyzed how we can buy a home as close as possible to - or even leave - this neighborhood where we now have stronger ties, good friends, playgroup, favorite weekend walk routes, a Starbucks, a co-op for our child.
While I was sitting quietly, looking out the window at the frame bungalow for sale, I widened my eyes and imagined it with new siding, repaired steps up to the porch, a slew of red and purple flowers lining the gangway.
My mother was on the phone with the realtor, asking questions about any updates (none), bedrooms (3), a basement (unfinished), kitchen (original), list price (high 3s) as if our ability was as real as our interest.
When we pulled away, my mom talked about the work the house would require, about renovations made a little at a time. I wanted to go to that place with her, to tell her that I thought it would look so sweet painted pale yellow with white trim. But my heart wouldn't let me.
It was a mixture of sad and dreamy, hopeful and realistic. I've been down this gangway before, and I know from experience, we're just not ready yet. As much as I want it, more now than ever, we're not there. Not just yet.
Lyrics: Slide by Goo Goo Dolls
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is a single mama in the city, super-savvy editor, writer, video host and shameless shoe whore.
Sunday, December 3, 2006 
