sweet abode

August 27, 2009, 7:20 pm
Filed under: daily, love/loathe

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself. – Maya Angelou

Ree can attest I was definitely feeling queer about moving to Orange County. (And not the good kind of queer.) It wasn’t specifically about the county (so much) because I’ve lived spittin’ distance from it my whole life. It was moving twenty whole minutes away from my parents and ensuring that I would be using freeways everywhere I went as there are 17.5 entrances in a one mile raduis of the abode. I presumed the traffic was worse and I would be far from all of my favorites (Mexican restaurant & take out, eyebrow lady, dive bar, etc). I could list a whole hell of a lot of reasons I was scared and nervous and anxious about moving into 2B with my best friend.

I think the scariest part was that I thought it might work.

I had never lived outside of my family’s home for more than five months and I’d never done so without Kiddo’s dad. My independence quests (all two of them) were failed almost as soon as I was done unpacking and back home I went. Living at home was crowded and chaotic, but I didn’t know any other way. There was at least four or six sets of eyes on Kiddo at all times. There was always milk in the fridge. There was never an inch and a half of dust on anything because there was other people someone else taking care of so many things around me.

Yeah, spoiled rotten, dude.

At 2B, that whole single parent thing that I’d been doing for a year already really happened. No one else was going to make dinner or be home if I wanted to run a quick errand alone or pick up food at the store when the shelves were running low. I had no idea how good I had it. (Sorry, Mom.)

I flailed a little bit for a while. Well, I flailed a lot last summer. But I’ve learned to swim in our old little bottom floor abode. And Ree is a natural mama, complete with instinct and just the right amount of push to help get the job done and pull to cut back when it’s time to figure something out on my/Kiddo’s own.

Absolutely, positively, my head would have fallen out the window on the 405 freeway if I lived with anyone else for the last fifteen months.

Awesome roommate/best friend/ninja aside, our little old place with the super crappy backyard and missing window screen in my room and frequent spiders in the corners and ugly carpet and weird wine bottle painting on the pantry and exposed tackstrip in just about every threshold…

…is the place I love being the most.