Magical Thinking for Mere Mortals

I was reading this article this morning on CNN, and it really struck a chord with me.  First of all, I too was completely engrossed in my dreamland when I was a kid.  I was weird and dreamy with short, dirty blond, very curly hair (that I thought was the ugliest thing in the world until I learned that not all hair is meant to be brushed) and a penchant for the dark and dramatic.

Yep, that's me at age 8.  I often imagined myself as a mermaid.  I loved Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid.  Even as a kid I was drawn to the dark beauty of this story.  I loved the magic and the sacrifice.  I also loved the long hair.

I remember taking my blue blanket (a twin-sized beauty with no ribbon edging left) and tying it around my head so that it would trail on the floor as my long, mermaid locks.  I would sit side-saddle on my unicorn and race around the back yard discovering fairy kingdoms in the grape arbor.  It was awesome.

And I didn't know until much later on (Like probably high school) how amazingly geeky I really was.  I was just cluelessly happy in my little world.  A couple of good friends who enjoyed my hair-brained ideas for fun, and I was good to go.

I can't even tell you how many nights I spent in the back yard playing Ouija and lighting candles in my pubescent years.  And, now, as an adult I look back to that magic with longing and joy.  In fact, I will still, on occasion, light the odd candle in the backyard and summon some spirits - mostly those sold in bottles with corks, but spirits none-the-less - I have not grown up too much, really.

But, like the writer, Eric Poole, I turn to different magic these days.  I have, as chronicled here, gone through many of my own life-changing issues in the last few years, and I totally know what Poole is talking about.  I found myself more than once in this dark (not the cool, goth kind) place beating myself up over decisions made or chances taken, wearing my "poverty... like a badge of honor," and spending more time than not cursing those who had wronged me.  What a waste of time and energ.y.

And, looking back now, I can tell you the day, maybe even the moment, it turned around.  It was the day we found out we were being foreclosed.  A big day.  A scary day.

Brett and I sat in the basement of our house and nervously danced around the issue.  We were so tense, neither of us wanting to start a fight about what we were going to do, who was at fault or whatever other useless yelling could have taken place but didn't.  And, although I may remember it wrong, I feel like we said it at the same time, "We just have to let it go."

It's such a simple sentence.  And it really applied to more than just the house.  All of it...we had to just let all of it go.  We had to stop beating ourselves up and feeling like victims and failures for the position we found ourselves in.  We had to look forward, make decisions and move on.

We had to let it go.  The house.  The "urban hipster" life.  The idea of who we were supposed to be.  None of it mattered anymore.  We had to stop talking the victim talk and walking the failure walk.  We had a family to think about.  We were done making bad decisions.  We were going to take our lives back and stop covering our faces when bad things happened.  And in that moment, we had more to be happy about than we could see.

We made a plan.  We stopped talking about the negatives, and magically our lives began to turn around. Yes.  There have been backslides.  Yes.  There have been bumps.  And, yes.  Our lives are 100x better than they were 2 years ago.  Partly because we have changed the "plan".  We have shifted our priorities, and we are talking about can happen instead of what has happened.

Everything changes.  Everything.  It is the one thing you can plan on.  And I fully believe that we have the power inside us to make every change a positive one.  I totally understand that it can be hard in the moment to see the positive, but it's there.   I promise.  If I can say, "bankruptcy and foreclosure improved my life."  I'm pretty sure, I know what I'm talking about.  Or maybe I'm still just that goofy 8-year-old riding on a unicorn and discovering fairies.  I'm cool with that too.

The Beginning

I had a dream a few nights ago that I had lost my way.  No one recognized me and I didn't know what had happened to my life.  I wandered, talked to people from my past and pieced together the story that someone had stolen a painting from me.  I could get my life back if only I could recreate this painting.  So I decided to try.  But the only way to recreate it was to sit on a couch that was suspended from a crane on top of a 30 story building.  My mother sat on one side of the couch and my husband on the other.  Any slight move from any of us would send the couch pitching to and fro, endangering our lives and making it difficult to finish the painting.  I woke up exhausted.

I keep thinking about that dream as my family begins the arduous task of cleaning out our rental house, packing up our belongings and moving into our new home along with my mother.  In the past 5 years my husband, Brett, and I have experienced the birth of two amazing boys - Urban, now 4 1/2 and Beringer, 14 months, life altering changes like unemployment, becoming landlords and then losing our property to short sale, bankruptcy and foreclosure.  We moved into a rental home a year and a half ago thinking we would stay for a while, lay low and rebuild.  But laying low is not exactly my style, and by fall I had a brainstorm that has led us on this path of inviting my mother into our immediate family and blending our lives to make a creative, fresh start.

My mother has been living alone ever since my father had to move into assisted living for Alzheimer's.  She is an hour and a half away from us in a city she has only been living in for 5 years.  We wanted to help her find some peace of mind, and she wanted to help us get into a permanent house we could call our own.  We sat down with the figures and realized that if she purchased a home with her good credit, Brett and I could pay the mortgage in similar payments to our current rent.  She would have some budget relief and we would have another adult in our house to help out with our tireless boys.  Once we sit out our credit rebuilding time, we can transfer the mortgage into our names.

We've spent the last 6 months looking for a perfect home - trying to find something that would suit our unique needs.  Duplexes were our first thought, but to fit a family of 4 on one side, you end up with far too much for a single person on the other.  An existing in-law suite, then?  Well, this is easier said than done.  We looked at everything from proper apartments to weird little basements with an extra kitchen.  Where could we find a place with few stairs - Mom is not great with long climbs - and enough bedrooms, dedicated spaces for a toy room and separate family rooms?  We explored the idea of renovating a foreclosure or even just a cheap house, but with our oldest almost in Kindergarten, good schools were imperative too.  It was a frustrating and crazy search.

Finally, we found a place that fit most of our criteria.  A 4 level split with a bed, bath and sitting room all on the main level and 3 bedrooms upstairs.  It is perfect.  We'll share kitchen and laundry, but have separate entertainment spaces.  There's enough room for the boys to have a toy room, and I'll even get a sewing room!  We're so excited to get started.

So, in the coming posts you'll read about our journey to move in, decorate on a tight budget, blend a multi-generational family and live our lives day-to-day.  Welcome to the funny farm.