[su_heading size=”18″]Renting A Home[/su_heading]

“I hate to say it Jillian my love, but you are sounding a bit manic,” my mother said to me over the phone when I was telling her about how the lease we were working on for the rental home we were to be moving into on Monday went POOF into thin air.  I guess I was sounding a bit too optimistic about the adventure of it all.

It all began after this comment I made on my Facebook Wall on August 20^th:

“Wanna know the “Real” part? Got a call at 10pm last night for a showing this morning at 9am. Had 6 boys sleeping over who didn’t go to sleep til 1am. Woke everybody up early. Picked up boxers that were spewed everywhere after running naked around the yard like monkeys (they just saw Planet of the Apes). Spilled tub of ground coffee all over kitchen floor….could this be the one?”

As it turns out, this was the buyer we were looking for and now I am running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off trying to find a place for our family to move into.

I wonder if you got a good laugh with my interview on MomsTV, you know, the one where I got inflicted with brain fart disease on-air forgetting mid-sentence what the question was. I was too busy thinking about which one of my favorite local hotels I could call and ask if I could stay there for like a month with three boys, a dog and a blog, and of course my 007’ing husband. As for the dry hair, it’s the hard minerals in our water I swear. I’m thankful that nobody was smoking or my head would have gone up in flames.

And then came the coughing attack that set in during the panel discussion. I felt like Aaron in Broadcast News when he sweats profusely while giving a news report. The coughing attack turned into a panic attack and I was just about ready to rip off my mice and run off set for water when the camerawoman motioned to me. I misread her sign language. I thought she was signing, “DO YOU WANT WATER?” but soon discovered, when the water never came to the rescue, that she was signing, “Are you alright?” of which I had nodded vehemently back YES.

That’s just a glimpse into my life these days, and the saga continues. No sleep. Nightmares where people are eating my ears. I had my nose glued to the rental listings the other day and Hootie-Hoo walks in, “Are you looking at houses again mommy? Is that a rental mommy or a rent to own house?”” he asked, the boys are getting just as obsessed as their mother to find a home.

Last Sunday we were one week away from closing and even though the rental contract was still under negotiations, all looked good. We had found a nice little home in suburbia, a fine place to call our own for six months.  It was to be an enormous departure from our home we are leaving but a welcome reprieve from all the stress we have endured for two years. It’s been a mixed bag of emotions for us experiencing guilt for feeling sad when we are so lucky to have found a buyer. For feeling anger toward the banks and incredibly distressing politics and elation for getting the chance to move forward and let go of our dream house that has been weighting us down, pulling us to deep murky depths.

In the past month, as I pack up our house and say goodbye to our land, our house and all of our neighbors, I feel like Steve Martin’s character Navin in the movie The Jerk, “And that’s the only thing I need is *this*. I don’t need this or this. Just this ashtray… And this paddle game. – The ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all I need… And this remote control. – The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that’s all I need… And these matches. – The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control, and the paddle ball… And this lamp. – The ashtray, this paddle game, and the remote control, and the lamp, and that’s all *I* need. And that’s *all* I need too. I don’t need one other thing, not one… I need this. – The paddle game and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches for sure. Well what are you looking at? What do you think I’m some kind of a jerk or something! – And this. That’s all I need.”

And as my friend Thomas added on Facebook:

“And I don’t need one other thing except my dog. (Shithead growls) “Well I don’t need my dog.”

To be continued….

**Click on this link for a post I wrote back in May of 2010 about our house and our land.

Scenes from our backyard: