Aug 27th, 2008
Limbo
Our new house is finished.
It’s beautiful… they’ve put hoists and a power shower and a huge walk-in wardrobe into Laughingboy’s room, and they’ve planted troughs full of rosemary and lavender outside our front door. They even made us a wee patio right outside the french doors in the back garden.
We did a bit of breaking and entering lately and spent a while wandering around the bare shell of our house dreaming and planning - revelling in the excitement and feeling that this huge frustrated wait has finally come to an end.
Except that it hasn’t. We’ve been bugging the council for months, trying to annoy them into giving us a key date and finally, we got a definitive answer this morning. It’s very accurate.
“Uhhh… don’t hold your breath” they said. How scientific.
Apparently the builders and the architects are having a fight about who’s daddy is bigger and meanwhile our new life has officially started elsewhere, leaving us in limbo.
Laughingboy’s school bus service has officially started, miles away from where we presently live. Puppychild will start playschool soon, in a school many miles away from here. I’ll have to quit my hours of taxi driving just so that I can bring my kids to school and hang around on a doorstep somewhere until they get out so that I can bring them back to our place of limbo. I’m a latchkey mom.
It feels like we’ve been wandering in a desert for the last three years and we’ve finally found an oasis, but there’s a big fence around it protected by sleeping guards. We’ve been so thirsty for so long that the idea of kidnapping some architect’s child until the snag-lists are complete doesn’t sound like such a far fetched idea after all.
I’m a woman on the edge.