the house is always greener

The bungalow we lived in when both Sasquatch and Gumby were born was a one bedroom one bath duplex that couldn't have been bigger than 800 square feet total - if even that. It also had a decent sized living room and dining room, a dinky kitchen with no counter space, a tiny laundry room and two enormous closets. It had lovely built-ins, a fireplace that hadn't worked since a magnitude 6.6 earthquake in 1971 and old rippled glass windows. The front yard was small, the enclosed patio was all concrete and we were right next to a depressed section of the Pasadena freeway. (As in underground, not melancholy).


In spite of all of it's faults, I loved that house.



We started out in the other half of the duplex, but when this side opened up six months after we got married we jumped on it. The light was better, it was twenty feet further away from the freeway and it had a fireplace that we didn't yet know didn't work. Of course the most significant thing about this house was that it was owned by a woman who had inherited it from her father, and she had some residual guilt about making a huge profit off of it. As a result, for the eleven and a half years we lived there, we paid approximately a third of what we should have been paying. It was a lovely town, with great schools (for my then non-existent children), and the real estate was beyond exorbitant. It also felt very safe to me, which was important in those pre-dog days, because between Film School and location shoots I was alone a lot. My family and friends thought I was crazy, but I loved the town and was willing to pay the price to live there. Or at least a third of it.


The problem started when Sasquatch was born. When it was just the Film Geek and I it was cozy but fine, especially since he was almost never at home. With a baby thrown into the mix it started to get a little tight, but it was still workable. As he got bigger it became more and more of a problem, one that I solved by never being at home. I was always toting him to a park or a play date or going out for long walks. It's not that we didn't have friends over, because we did. It just wasn't my first preference. I may have loved my house, but I started feeling a little embarrassed when people saw it for the first time and looked for the rest of it. We were the house version of the VW bug at the circus that has thirty clowns climb out of it. I always coveted my friend's homes, with their yards and more than one bedroom and a dining room that didn't have a crib in it. My real estate lust was kicking into high gear.


But I had painted myself into a corner, because I wanted to stay home with Sasquatch. This meant living on one freelance film production income that swung wildly from month to month. And, because of the ridiculousness of the rent, adding even one bedroom would have taken us from $475 a month to at least $1000. And that was for an apartment. It was simply not an option. We would have to stay put.


Then, almost four years later, came Gumby. What had been tight became unbearable. I spent a lot of time worrying that I was permanently scarring my kids by living in a toy strewn shoe box. Granted, they didn't look deprived, but the fact that our entire house would fit into some of our friend's living rooms was really making me crazy. Once again, no matter how I tried to work it out moving, even to another lower priced town, was not an option.


When Gumby was nine months old, we found out that my OB/GYN didn't know what the hell she was talking about when she had told me my childbearing days were over. The burgeoning cloud of Surfer Dude hung over us and this is what he was saying...


"You need a bigger house."


So we bit the bullet and moved. In a twist that proves that I'm irresistible to generous old ladies, we lucked into a very similar deal. A three bedroom, two bath back house/duplex with a fenced yard in the same town for way under market value. I had to charm and schmooze and write a letter that extolled our virtues, but in spite of all of that we got the house. And we lived there quite happily until we moved to Kansas, although it was certainly a struggle financially at times.


I relaxed some once we had a little room to spread out. The kids made themselves comfortable right away. We knew the people next door and they had three kids roughly the same ages as ours. It was still a back house and it was still a duplex, but I didn't care. I didn't have to fold up the sofa bed every morning to get to the front door to get the newspaper. Life was good.


About half way through his kindergarten year Sasquatch came home raving about his good friend Patrick's new house that they had just moved into. He went on and on about it, until my curiosity was piqued. I couldn't wait to get a look at this place. Their old house had been a perfectly respectable house, nothing to write home about, a ranch like hundreds of others. This new one must be something else.


It was a second floor, walk up apartment. And Sasquatch swore it was the best house he had ever been in. When I asked him why he liked it so much he said because you could hang over the railing outside the front door and drop jellybeans on people's heads when they walked by. When Patrick came to our house he went on and on about the fact that we had dinosaur posters all over the walls in our front bathroom and that Sasquatch had the best house he had ever been in. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was about to be taught a lesson in perspective. The grass really is always greener on the other side. Especially when you're a kid. This is a hard one for me to grasp, especially when I count up all the money we've thrown down the toilet on rent to give them a place to live that's bigger than a postage stamp.


I'm thinking about this now because Saturday night Gumby and Surfer Dude had a friend over to spend the night. This is one of the few friends they both get along with, and a super nice kid to boot. After an fun and trauma free evening they asked if they could go over to his house for the afternoon Sunday. It was okay with his mom so I said sure.


As I dropped them off at the tiny little house that their friend shares with his mom, his aunt and his grandpa, I heard Surfer Dude say "Cool! I'll trade you houses! This is awesome!"and his friend said "Yeah!Let's do it! Your house rocks!"


I get that the grass is always greener on the other side. But I just keep thinking... should I never have moved in the first place or have I been buying the wrong houses all these years?


Or are my kids simply trying to kill me?