Our Song--Matthew Sweet's "Waiting"

So I'm still waiting for some kind of official notice that we really and truly have a loan, and that we therefore will really and truly have a house that we have a right to call our own next week. Supposedly next Monday. So far all I have is what my husband says the broker's assistant says the bank says, which is apparently "yes." Not exactly sure when, but yes. Don't get me wrong. In my book that means the house is moving closer, rather than farther away like it was three days ago. But as a lawyer (by training if not by current practice, or even current mindset), all this hearsay doesn't really do it for me. So I'm still waiting for confirmation and a little more peace of mind. The song "Sitting Here in Limbo" keeps running through my mind. But then what came through much more clearly, and so much more sweetly, was my husband's and my "our song": Waiting by Matthew Sweet.

I've had a bunch of relationships in my day, several of them very sweet and/or committed, but most of them a total nightmare even to remember. The latter largely because I never knew how to value myself and so kept picking men who didn't, either. John, my beloved spouse, is emblematic of the traditional complaint that girls always fall for assholes instead of the guys who can really love us for who we are. My long road to John is a story for another day, but suffice it to say he was the nicest of nice guys, and therefor scared the hell out of me. I couldn't be responsible for that! But he knew what he wanted, and he never changed his mind in the course of the eight years it took us to come together--even if he would have liked to, and frequently had to separate himself from me for years at a time until I figured it out. Somewhere in there, he introduced me to Matthew Sweet's album, "Girlfriend." "Girlfriend" itself is a great, rocking song. Wonderful to sing at the top of your lungs riding along the beach with the top down or the windows open, or both. But "Waiting" --oh. My heart lifts and twists at the same time. Sweet's voice is clear and pure on this one. And the voice and the music and the lyrics are all so full of that early summer of gentle longing, a yearning but with a feeling that there is real hope that this dream will come true. When I hear it I feel that exquisite sensation of just beginning to suspect that the one you love might actually love you back. It hasn't happened yet for sure, but you think it's about to, and the waiting is worth it. In fact, the waiting makes it better. Its maybe even its own separate form of pleasure. I've never really had an "our song" with anyone else. I'm not even sure that John thinks of it exactly that way, but I know he associates it inextricably with me, and I with him, and that it belongs to us.

It makes me smile to think of that song. I think I'll go play it. And you won't believe this, but honest to God, when I started writing this I didn't think that the song had any parallels to the house other than the title. But maybe it does. That would be cool.

I'll leave you with pictures of the yard today, and picture of the boxes I'm tackling downstairs. You couldn't see the back door before, so there's some progress.

It’s so ironic. From the moment we committed to build the house I’ve had an overwhelming, even suffocating sense of karmic dread--that we were getting too far above ourselves, or maybe that we were just putting too many eggs in one basket. We wanted to make it up to ourselves for all we'd lost by building a house that could give us a warm hug in the cold grey winters here. And something in me said "hubris" at the same time I said "yes, that's what we need." The dread didn’t abate until the paint colors I'd agonized over went up about a month ago; then it eased a bit. I hadn't ruined the house. It came back with the ridiculous landscaping costs two weeks ago that I no longer had the energy, this close to closing, to hammer back down as far as ithey really should go. But for the last week I haven’t been feeling dread but rather have finally permitted some feelings of pride, longing, and excitement along with a little apprehensiveness of the drudgery of moving house again. The house is done, it looks good, barring a few paint colors that didn't quite work, and I was done making changes and costly, retirement savings-depleting decisions. No more guilt and worry, no more dread of financial disaster. In a couple more days we would finally have a real home, and really begin life again, after 17 wasting months of loss and limbo.

And then, today, I think it all may have started down the hill to the calamity I feared. We didn’t manage to get our 2008 tax return filed until our loan documents were already pending. Today the lender found out that there is no 2008 tax receipt, and everything on our loan stopped. So it looks like we have no loan, at least not until our rate lock has already expired, and well after our contract requires us to close. But we have put a fifth of our net worth into the house already, and we have no loan contingency in the contract. All of the scenarios for what to do now are going to wind up costing even more money, which makes my stomach hurt. But what really scares me is this thought--worse, it feels like recognition-- that has been swimming around in my stomach all day and has finally surfaced in my head: “I always knew deep down it would end in disaster, in complete and total loss. I somehow never could believe we’d all live there together. Losing Dodger and Mammoth and the Palisades house and Nathan’s school wasn’t the end of the losing. That was just the middle.”

Of course, I’m an under-medicated (manic?) depressive with (some say) post-traumatic stress disorder. So we can always hope that this is just my crazy talking.

It has just occurred to me, horribly, that the last time were were this smug and joyous and full of plans about an anticipated event, the outcome was so devastating that we--or maybe just I--have never recovered. Oh, God. Please, I mean really please, let me be wrong about this one.