Monthly Archives: November 2009

A few weeks ago I wrote about our painstaking process of deciding where to live.  I say painstaking only because I caused Mike a lot of pain. 

Headaches.  High demands.  Histrionics.

He estimates that he spent 13 hours a week canvassing Redfin, Windermere and Zillow to find us the perfect place to buy.  He obsessed.  He compared.  There were spreadsheets, listing print-outs, and saved “Favorites.”

Guess how many hours I spent each week?  Hint: it’s the same number of hours I spend watching Star Trek.

To me, online research holds the same appeal as voluntarily attending a life insurance seminar.  To Mike, online research is like crack cocaine laced with ecstasy.  So, we agreed it only made sense for him to handle that part of the process.

Now imagine the ensuing scenario when Mike has filtered through hundreds of listings to bring me to two condos/houses that pass his intense selection process, and I walk in the door and the first thing out of my mouth is, “Oooh, I don’t know if I can live with that light fixture.”

For the rest of my life I’m not sure I will be able to match the look of apoplectic frustration on my husband’s face. 

The truth is that he and the realtor only showed me beautiful places to buy, all of which were entirely livable (except one glaring exception, which I will only say was inhabited by a creature who had no desire to see the floor, dispose of food or empty the litter box…but I digress).

I think that was the problem, actually.  I trusted that Mike’s standards were the same as mine, so differenciating the potential places really came down to details. 

I ended up trusting him so much that when he said “Let’s make an offer” on a condo I had only spent five minutes inside, I said “OK.”  And when that offer was unexpectedly accepted, and I realized I was going to own something that had not been validated by my control-freakiness, I didn’t panic; I celebrated.

I hadn’t relinquished my control to Mike, entirely; I had more privately given control to God, saying, in essence, “Please figure this out for us because I am going to have a minor heart attack or a major stroke before it’s over if You don’t.”  And He did.

Just like when I committed to Mike and felt the finest freedom of my life, I had that same rush of release when we committed to buying the condo.  It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes of all time, and I’m not at all embarrasssed that it’s from a Starbucks cup:

“The irony of commitment is that it is deeply liberating; in work, in play, in love.  The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation.  To commit is to remove your head as the barrior to your life.”  Anne Morris

So…we’re commited.  Last Thursday, November 12th, we closed on a condo in Kirkland.  Yes, the location question has been answered and the Reph’s will soon be Eastsiders. 

…with a pretty kitchen.  Any woman worth her salt knows the kitchen is the heart of the home, so if that doesn’t make you happy, it doesn’t matter if the rest of the place is gilded in gold.

While we will ache for Seattle in more ways than we even know, we are sure that Kirkland is right for us, right now.  My commute to work reached nearly 20 miles each way recently, and from Kirkland it will only be eight.  Mike loves his job in Bellevue and wants to create more community in an area where both our work and church reside. 

Of course, downtown Seattle is still only nine miles away.  It’s not as though we moved to Yakima.

And do we care that we’re cheesy?  Do we care that most people probably don’t still carry their wives over their thresholds?  No, no we do not. 

Why?  Because after going through tireless work to make something happen, we celebrate.

It’s been one of those days when I constantly wonder how I am going to function for the next five minutes.  Mike and I are wading in the cloudy waters of trying to purchase our first home.  Turns out no matter how orderly your affairs are, the banks and the government can still sneer as you squirm under their magnifying glass in the sun.

Dealing with mortgage paperwork today grew so simultaneously intense and depressing that I had to leave work.  Granted, leaving at 3:30 when I show up at 7:15 isn’t that big of a deal, but it felt dramatic.  I hurried out of the building and then walked slowly through the rain to my car.  And then I wet my face with my own tears for the entire ride home.

It seemed the tears and the rain weren’t enough to rinse my attitude, so I thought a run would be more effective.  It didn’t feel like exercise; it felt like survival.  I ran straight into the wind and dared it to take me down.  I thought surely it would.

It’s funny how much faster my thoughts come when I’m motoring down the sidewalk.  It’s like my legs force my brain to crank out negativity at twice the going rate.   That might sound counterproductive, but in fact it serves to cut my overall catharsis in half…thirty minutes running equals one hour of crying.

“Hey!”

I glanced up quickly to see who had hollered at me.  I saw a man with long dark hair, holding a Coors Light in one hand and a bag of his possessions in the other.

“Hey…”  I barely replied, since speaking to strangers on the street tends to freak me out.   He was standing under a busstop for protection from the rain and I was approaching, about to pass by.

“Beautiful,” he said quietly.  I looked at him again.  What?

“BEAUtiful,” he said again, this time more emphatically.  I’ve been called various lewd things by people on the street before, but this word wasn’t among them.  And oddly, this didn’t seem creepy, because he didn’t seem to mean it to be.

It took me a couple of paces to consider this, but by then I was past him so I hurridly glanced back.  He gave a small, humble smile.  Somehow, incredibly, I felt it was fully intended for me to feel loved — not by him, of course, but by God.  I know that comes across as though I am on my fourth martini to be writing that, but I really believe it.

Sometimes I put God in too small a space and then I lecture Him by saying He can only reach out to me in three specific ways: prayer, the Bible, and trusted friends.  Then He promptly ignores my lecture and shocks me by using a scraggly stranger to call me beautiful on the street.

And let me tell you, beautiful I was not.  My hair clung to my face from the rain, my clothes were soaked in water and sweat, and I was probably as red as a cosmo in a cold glass.

I started to cry as I ran, which is just as awkward as it sounds, especially when there are forty cars crossing Mercer in rush hour traffic.  I imagined them in their cars saying to their passengers, “What’s with that girl?  Running must be REALLY hard for her if she has to bawl just to get through it.”

It occured to me as I ran that this is just one day.  I am moving through life with burdens and struggles like anyone, but I am running.  I’ve got legs to carry me and a heart that’s still pumping.

It doesn’t really matter where we live, if we get the condo we’re trying to get, or if we rent for the next ten years.  That doesn’t define us.  Just like the man under the busstop, we’re essentially homeless in this world.  But that’s not so bad when one of your own calls you beautiful.

I rounded the corner onto Fairview with a refreshed ferver.  I abandoned my hostility, looked at the sky and sprinted all the way home.