A fresh start?

A little more than a year ago, I was on the fence about moving into my grandmother's old house. We had been renting our old place for $400 a month , and for that price, we had a full two-bedroom house and basement on a few acres of land. Its location sat a few convenient feet away from my sister's house and just five houses down from my parents' house. While it sometimes seemed a bit too close for comfort, having such a strong family network helped out a lot when I needed a respite from my husband's addictions.

There were a few big drawbacks to that old place. The biggest was its septic system. Living at the edge of the rural water grid meant that our house used an old concrete septic tank. Country dwellers know that a septic tank has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. The biggest plus to the septic system is that it can be a very environmentally conscious way to handle waste. The waste goes into a holding tank and eventually gets broken down until it can move out into the drain field. What little isn't broken down gets left in the tank, to be suctioned out every few and driven away in a tank.

This all works pretty well, unless, of course, you mess with the system. While I can't say that we were the entire problem to the old concrete tank, our massive loads of antibacterial cleaners probably didn't help much. It wasn't too long after we moved in that our kitchen sink started to belch out nasty smells when we flushed. Other times, it would just start backing up with water while someone took a shower. We would scramble into the kitchen with a can of air freshener when someone used the bathroom. We had to make sure that we sanitized the sink before we did dishes.

Another drawback to the septic system is when something goes wrong, it can be a pain to figure out the issue. Another is that many of the people who repair septic systems would rather sell you an expensive replacement than they would to help you find out where the problem is. Even getting them out there can be expensive. That's why it took months for our landlord to get someone out there, and they eventually tried to get it fixed themselves. I'm not entirely sure that it has ever gotten fixed, but the septic problems combined with the constant stress of late rent payments drove us to find other arrangements. This house.

I knew we weren't getting anywhere with the way we were living at the old place, but I still hate the idea of moving into my grandmother's house. Even though she's been dead since 2004, there were many things in here that remained just as she had left them. The china cabinet still held vintage glassware, smudged with a patina of dust held hostage by cigarette residue. The kitchen still had her chrome-and-green table and ratty chairs, plus shelves of old cookware and containers. There were even two shelves of home-canned food, now more than a decade out of date.

My husband made efforts to erase the visible memories from the house. He spent hours here, cleaning, ripping up moldy carpeting, and taking down damaged ceiling tiles. We removed furniture and packed up several boxes worth of mementos/junk to take to their new home in my dad's garage. Even though my husband made some valiant efforts, it took months before I was able to spend time in the house without feeling like I was just an interloper in a shrine to grandma.

A big problem with this is, even though we have taken a lot out of the house, there are still plenty of vestiges available. We took out the living room furniture, but we still have her complete dining room set, including table, chairs sideboard and and china cabinet, as well as an entire bedroom set, which has a dressing table and chest of drawers in addition to the bed frame. In a larger house, they could be relegated to a basement. In this smaller place, the furniture stands guard in their designated rooms, ensuring that we never forget the former residents.

I would really like to get rid of these things. None of it is particularly worth anything, either monetarily or sentimentally. Right now, this stuff just takes up space. I would have already gotten rid of it by now, except that my dad still wants to hang onto the stuff. This stuff is even more firmly entrenched in his childhood than it is in mine. I would be happy to take it to his house, but he doesn't have the space there. So, here it remains.

I feel like my personal history kind of acts in the same way that this furniture does. It reminds me of my old selves, those pieces of me that don't quite fit anymore with who I want to be. I think I would love to be able to find a clean, uncluttered conscience when I close my eyes at night, but still I trip over boxes and boxes of mental embarrassment. I have nowhere to store it out of the way, and it seems as if there is no place to discard anything.

Do other people have these kinds of feelings? How do you get rid of that kind of baggage? Is there such a thing as a fresh start?

A few updates

With the exception of the previous post, it has been more than a year since I've added to this blog. In an effort to get up to speed, here's a short synopsis of what has happened.

At the end of the summer before last, my dad offered to let us live in my grandmother's old house in town. We moved out of the old place and into this one. It is a small two-bedroom house that hadn't been lived in much in this decade, and hadn't been lived in at all since 2004.

With the benefit of getting out from under paying rent for a house with a faulty septic system, we had the drawback of moving into a house without working plumbing or an up-to-date electrical system. Soon after we moved in, my dad installed line to get us a single tap of cold water to the bathroom sink. We spent the next few months flushing the toilet with a filled ice cream bucket and heating water on the stove or with my trusty hot cocoa maker. More recently, my husband has rigged a working faucet in the kitchen and even a dishwasher (Free from craigslist. Yes, it does heat the water!). My daughter and I drive across town a few times a week to get showers at my parents' house and my husband takes "whores' baths" in the sink. Every few months, he will give in and come with us to take a shower, but mostly, he just gets by with the sink bath.

We would love to put in a hot water heater, but that would involve upgrading the electrical system. The house still has a knob-and-tube system, complete with four whole fuses for the house. Instead of updating the entire system, my DIY-crazy uncles have "improved" on the original knob-and-tube system by putting subpanels (I think that's what they're called) near where the water heater and the electric dryer go. Those subpanels are still old enough to be fuse-based.

The current system allows for a certain amount of our electrical usage, but there are times when adding one too many of our modern conveniences to the circuit plunges us into partial darkness. Running the dishwasher and heater (or air conditioner in the summer) for example, pushes that poor little 30 amp fuse to its doom. Of course, it hasn't kept us from enjoying our modern entertainment. We still have our wireless broadband, our computers and our TV. The only difference is now we can only have one TV and one computer going, and we must turn something off before we use the dishwasher.

I know, I know. I'm lucky we have the dishwasher in the first place. It was a pretty good score. The guy on craigslist wanted $50 or best offer for it, but had it for a few months without any takers. When he asked my husband what his best offer was, my husband jokingly said, "Free?" and the guy accepted.

We're also lucky to have the entertainment stuff, although that comes at a price, too. If my husband wasn't so rent-to-own happy, we wouldn't have the TV we have now, but if it weren't so pawn happy, we would have had a perfectly good if slightly smaller one. We had to give up on the satellite, after failing to keep it paid, but we also have enjoyed the benefits of hulu (and now netflix, until we can't afford that any more). We keep the internet paid, but just barely. A few months ago, my husband also got the bright idea that he needed a smart phone, and signed up for a plan that he was unable to keep. He also got me one for my birthday, even though I didn't want one. Although it also has gone by the wayside, I have enjoyed the benefits of its wifi capabilities.

But putting all of this technology in a crumbling house is akin to putting a massive soundsystem in a Festiva. The benefit to being so wired is that it can distract us from our inability to fix the roof or put in new wiring or get a hot water heater installed. It also keeps us from keeping up with the basic utilities that my father still refuses to put in our names. If we can't keep him paid, how could we keep these companies paid? I do entirely see his point.

See? More bad choices, one after the other.

As for the job front, my husband got fired from his program assistant job after failing to put in the appropriate paperwork for a medical leave to manage his head issues. While that's the official reason, at one point the school administrators claimed he had been written up for performance issues. The only issue we know of is his absenteeism, as his review was stellar. In any case, he now has a job managing at a local truck stop. He likes it pretty well. For now, at least.

We still haven't seen anyone about his head. We had a specialist lined up in a nearby city, but that fell through when he got fired. He's been managing his own pain with tramadol from a local doc-in-a-box. I wish he could get by with less medicine, but it's amazing how much a less stressful job and a feeling of confidence in his work has reduced his headaches.

As for me, well, I'm still a loser. I thought I had a decent job with a local newspaper, but it was never a formal arrangement. I was doing regular stringer work for them, writing a few articles and a column. Soon after I quit my card-slinging job, they reduced their number of pages and the stringer work dried up. I've been making do with some odd jobs here and there, but I'm still without a full-time job to call my own.

My crap-splotched road of bad decisions has turned into a highway, and I haven't found the off ramp yet.

The well-traveled road

Do you ever get the feeling that every choice you make has been the wrong one, that even when you think you're going in the right direction, you take the fork in the road that leads you right back down to where you started?

I feel like that. All of the time.

There's nothing in my childhood to really point to a preponderance for bad decision-making. At least I don't think there is. I spent most of my time playing with Barbies and designing clothes for them and reading from an old set of encyclopedias at my grandma's house.

And watching old movies. I loved old movies.

I can't say that every decision I made was a bad decision. There are plenty of good decisions in my life. For example, my decision to try out for a play in high school led me to a larger group of friends and more confidence than my shy little self could handle. That confidence even trickled over into participating in an internship in our state capital when I was a senior in high school.

But that's where the good decisions seem to stop. Instead of figuring out how to pay for college, I opted to hide away in my house, scared to make the next move. My days and nights bled into long hours sleeping, all in an effort to avoid the mistake-filled future I could see coming.

After I opened my eyes to that possibility, my decisions led me down a noisy road. I made good decisions -- getting a job and moving out on my own at 18 -- but those choices became tempered by the many, many more bad choices that seemed right at the time. It took me six years to decide what I wanted to do with my life, and that decision only came after becoming a single parent at age 24. And THAT predicament only came from navigating the choppy waters of sexual and emotional relationships with prior experience equivalent to a canoe cobbled together from books, newspapers and craft glue. I was one hot mess back then.

The next few years seemed to turn my good-to-bad decision ratio into my favor.

I :

• went back to school (good),
• learned the joys of the internet (bad),
• found friends online (good)
• found a job in retail (good and bad)
• and used my associates' degree to propel me northward (good, kind of).

But then that led me to:

• my first apartment up north (bad),
• a trial run as an escort (so, so bad)
• a temporary stay for my daughter at my parents' house (bad),
• an affair with a Dutchman (kind of good),
• a series of bad decisions that screwed that affair up (so bad),
• an exit from school before I had completed my degree (very, very bad),
• a new apartment where my daughter and I could both stay (good),
• bats, cold water and a lecherous landlord (bad),
• a decent job in a large corporation (good),
• another new apartment, this time with an ex-convict cop as a landlord (eh, it was okay), and
• a network of real-life friends who were just as supportive as the ones I found online (very good).

Then my now-husband came into my life. Most every decision made since that point has been questionable, at best. I could find some good choices in there, but most of them have led down the well-worn path of folly.

I would like to say that I have learned something in this process, but the only conclusion I can make is that I am terrible at making decisions.