Sixteen years ago last week, I moved into the home I currently live in. Back then, it was me, husband #1, son #1 and son #2. The two parents were in their 20s, one kid was 17 months old, and the other was 2 months old.
The first night we slept in the house, parents slept on the third floor, and babies were on the second floor. When baby #2 started his nightly howling at 3:00 a.m.—the “Holy Moses I am starving please come and feed me” scream—and woke me from my slumber, I looked around, not remembering where I was or how I got there, and proceeded to fall down the flight of stairs that separated me from the baby.
Fortunately, as I mentioned previously, I was in my 20s, so the fall down the stairs had basically no impact on me whatsoever. No pain when it happened, none the next day. It could have been the combination of total shock or the total overwhelming sense of relief when hysterical baby came in contact with food source, but I felt just fine. I was filled with such joy watching my adorable, blue-eyed, yummy boy eat, and I was so totally sleep deprived that it was all good and calm (especially since he had stopped screaming and still hadn’t managed to wake up son #1, and let’s of course keep in mind that the father of these children slept through the entire ordeal…even my delicately bopping down the stairs).
And the answer to your question is no, I was not actually delicate. Had this fall down the stairs happened to me now, well, if my orthopedist is reading this article, he knows the results would be much different. There would be kvetching and aching and heating pads and Aleve and Advil and Lord knows what else. But let’s go back to then, when pain came second to anything your child needed. The house had a lot of stairs and even the older of the two boys was a little rusty in the stair department, so we would either set up shop on the third floor playroom, the main floor playroom or the basement playroom.
When we began looking for our “dream house,” my objective was to find a house that was neat, clean, and move-in ready. I was pregnant with son #2 when we began the house hunt. When you are pregnant, your senses are on higher alert. We walked into one house and it smelled like there were dead bodies in it; several other houses smelled liked dog (not that there is anything wrong with having a dog).
You also learn that telling your real estate agent what your price range is does not always mean that she will listen to you. The first house I saw had three living rooms—large living rooms. What was I going to do with three living rooms? There was one section in town that we looked at where every house was mauve inside and was filled with extensive collections of potpourri, which apparently induce nausea when you are pregnant (the toilets in that house worked great).
The house we ended up buying, the one that we have called home for all of these years was not on my realtor’s list of disasters. But when I saw it, and saw the street it was on, I had to check it out. After several phone calls to the listing agent, we were inside. It was perfect. I had never seen such a clean house before (and after we moved in, it never looked like that again.) I was not thinking that a car couldn’t fit into the garage; I was not thinking that there was no central air conditioning; I was not even thinking about the fact that I couldn’t fit into the eating area of the kitchen (but only because I was really pregnant).
I just remember looking at the two steps that led to the kitchen—the steps that no one actually uses now (they walk around the back way)—and picturing that when husband #1 would come home from work, he would open the front door and we would all be sitting on those steps waiting to greet him. Ya, nice thought, but that never actually happened…even though in my mind, I was convinced it would.
So this is our home. Our boys are growing up, the stairs are getting a little harder to walk, but I cannot imagine living anywhere else. Of course, at the closing we discovered that the couple was selling the house because they were getting divorced, but that story is for another time.
By Banji Latkin Ganchrow
