My kingdom for a mantra!

The house has only been on the market for a week, here in the dog days of summer, and yet it has been looked at by several people, and by dozens of brokers. This is good, correct? Still, no one has fallen in love and demanded to purchase it, which I find (though I know I should not) discouraging. My mother told me to ask the realtor not to tell me anything about any of the people who looked, unless there was a written offer; this struck me as brilliant advice, but I am weak, and I crave information. Information about potential buyers makes me crazy–I know this from the previous times I’ve listed the house, when I’d get all hopped up after hearing that the couple from the 1:30 showing had twins and were from Boston and LOVED the yard and the town and were really just deciding between my house and one other house and oh my god, they’d be perfect, I bet they’ll make an offer today. I’d imagine the whole damned thing, right down to which bedrooms the twins might like, and then they’d vanish into the ether, which was massively infuriating. Who did they think they were, with their twins and their snotty Boston attitude? I’d mutter to my reflection, as I windexed the bathroom mirror for the millionth time. I’m going to figure out which house they finally bought, so consoling-windows friend and I can egg it. This actually happened, more than once–the muttering, not the egging, more’s the pity–and trust me, it’s not half as much fun as it sounds.

“I’m going to hit a wall of worry at some point, again, I can feel it coming on,” I told my long-suffering boyfriend on Sunday night, as we lay chatting before sleep. We were both a little glum, the way we always are at the end of a weekend spent together. “I know it, and I don’t want to. I have wasted too much time worrying already. Let’s think of some magical way to think about it all, to stave off lunacy, shall we?”

We tried. But we were tired. We had been camping and hiking and canoeing, all of which were glorious, and then we had driven a long way home. We mumbled a bit, but nothing brilliant came of it. I slept badly, and woke up worried, and we said goodbye and he went off to work and I drove home, collected the children, and immediately commenced to fret.

Two close friends recently had their mothers die, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, and there is nothing like the unexpected death of a couple of beloved friends’ mothers to put one’s own petty problems in perspective–which, after all, is where they belong. Still, the heart has its palpitations of which reason knows nothing. I have tried to understand why this damned house-selling drives me up a wall, why it fundamentally unnerves me so much (the idea being that irrational emotions are much harder to cope with than emotions with distinct and fathomable etiologies) and I have failed, again and again. Yes, it’s a pain in the neck to keep the house clean. Yes, the house is a symbol. Yes, the house is a yoke around my neck. Yes, the house is a bad combination of predictable overexpenditure (the day-to-day) and unpredictable, terrifyingly bottomless overexpenditure (the furnace that may break, the roof that may leak, the appliances that may act up). Yes, it’s where the marriage and its sad, sad end played out. Yes, it reminds me of my ex-husband and the life we had when we were happy. All that, and much more (I despise feeling powerless! I cannot move until it sells! I am by nature impatient!) and yet really, does this need to be an existential crisis? People put houses on the market. They sell. Or don’t. It happens, quite literally, every single day.

I had a ghastly dream the other night, in which I seemed to revisit the very worst days of the divorce. The dream hangover was bad; I haven’t felt the way I felt in the dream in a very long time. I woke up hating and dreading my ex-husband in equal measure, wallowing in guilt and rage. I am massively grateful that those days are gone. But the dream brought everything back; hearing my ex-husband’s voice today on the phone made me nauseated, even though he was perfectly polite. As was I. He and the kids tended to the house between showings while I was off having a lovely time in the woods. After we hung up, he texted me. “I put some tomatoes and herbs from my garden in a bag for you by the front door,” the text said. “I told the kids to remember but I wanted to make sure you did, too.” (Yes, he has a lovely garden in the Cottage Formerly Known as Dream. My cottage. A feeble paroxysm of jealous rage bubbled up, then was gone. I am, it turns out, too tired to worry about the cottage any more. Oh, yay, tomatoes, I thought, in an absent minded way. How nice. They were. I ate them for supper.)

So nothing is wrong, all is well, but I am anxious anyway, and I want the house to sell, and there is nothing I can do to hasten the process, and so I have simply forbidden myself to worry about it until the end of September. A banishing spell. Nothing else–not putting the situation in perspective, or trying to stay positive, or even trying just to peacefully coexist with uncertainty (I sound like a yoga teacher, don’t I?) works at all. So consider yourselves warned. I’m not going to write about the house (unless something remarkable occurs) until the end of September. I’m not being coy, I’m just trying to maintain a shred of equipoise.

Unless, of course, I get an offer. Then all bets are off.