I love my mom; I hate my house

Hiya folks.

I'm not sure how almost a week has gone by since I last posted.  I keep opening Blogger and staring at the empty box and getting nowhere.

I spent the weekend in Atlanta with my parents.  Mostly I spent time with my mom.  I almost didn't make it down there because of crazy weather delays and last minute flight changes, but thankfully I made it because I really needed some "mom" time as I haven't had any family interaction since the m/c and I needed it.  Spent the weekend hanging around with my parents and other family.  My mother and I shopped (didn't buy much, but shopping was an excuse to be together) and talked and stopped at coffee shops and talked and cried and talked and ate and ate and talked some more.  It was just what I needed.  My mom has always been my best friend and it's been so hard to keep that up since I moved away 8 years ago.  I miss her so much.  I just needed someone I knew would listen to me and who would be there while I cried and listen to my fears about IF and the m/c.  My DH tries, but he doesn't know what to do with me most of the time.  The trip was really his idea because he knew I needed her.

Unfortunately, as soon as I got back home, all my stress and anxiety about IF, my m/c, my house and school starting rushed back in.  My DH and I have been trying to figure out what to do about our living situation for a while.  I hate our house.  My DH doesn't hate it (it was his before I moved in) but he does hate the situation we're in with it right now.  It is falling apart and in horrible shape.  It is full of crap because my DH is a pack rat and I'm just disorganized and we have no storage and so things just keep piling up around us until it feels like the walls are closing in.  (I'm afraid the crew of Hoarders is going to walk in and start filming an episode at any moment.)  The problem is that we like the location (we can walk to work) and there aren't any other options around that would be much better that we could afford. We live in a small, poor, rural college town. Houses here are either old and in bad shape or only affordable by the "rich" in town.  So, we've been saving money to put into the house.  Neither one of us is really sure it is worth putting too much into the house, though, because I think it really would take a complete re-build for it to be worth it.  And, if we tried to sell it, the only people who would buy it would buy it for a student rental (that's what it used to be) so we wouldn't get much return on any money we put into it.

It needs new windows.  It needs new siding (we've been in the process of scraping and painting it for about three years).  The heat and air conditioning don't work upstairs and we have to use window units and space heaters.  We couldn't actually bring a child home to it the way it is right now.  The kitchen and bathrooms need a complete overhaul.  The house is about 60 years old and that's the last time the kitchen and downstairs bathroom were touched.  Tiles are falling off the walls in the bathroom.  The kitchen is minuscule and I hate cooking in it.  So, I end up not cooking and we eat horribly.  There is an ancient electric stove that only has two working burners.  (I finally had to buy a two-burner hot plate to put next to it to save my sanity.)  We keep saying we're going to replace it, but I want a gas stove and we have to run the gas line to do that, so we keep putting it off until we know what we plan to do with the kitchen altogether.  There is about 2 1/2 feet of usable counter space and no storage.  I'm desperate for a dishwasher.  But, because the kitchen is so small, it would take a major remodel to put one in.

So, we're looking into renovating it.  But, to do it the way we really want to will cost way more than it is worth it for this house.  The estimates we were working with seemed reasonable but we just got new estimates that make it impossible to consider.  After we got the numbers yesterday everything just got to be too much.  The money for the kitchen. Recognizing that, if we stay here, I will never like this house.  No matter what we do to it, it is never going to be enough.  Knowing that there aren't any other alternatives we can afford.  Not being pregnant.  Having a m/c.  Starting back to school and not being able to get out of my head the image I had of what this year was going to look like and knowing it is changed. 

Add to all of that being 8DPO yesterday and hormonal and not sleeping at night because of stress and it just all came to a head.  I cried harder and longer than I've cried since we've been TTC.  We had a good talk but we came to one pretty rotten conclusion -- things suck right now and there aren't any good options.

In the light of day, things aren't as bad.  I still hate the house.  I still can't have anyone over because it is just such a mess.  We still can't put the money into it.  But, I think we're going to try to take it one step at a time and redo the living room.  If we at least had one room in the house that wasn't full of crap and looked like actual professional adults lived in it instead of poor grad students, that might help.  My DH is trying to come up with some alternatives for the kitchen.

Truly, I think part of the stress is that I don't want to spend any money on the house because I'm still afraid, in the end, we're going to need that money for treatments.  That's the main reason we haven't done anything to the house prior to now -- we've been holding onto it for a while "just in case." But, I hate the situation we're living in right now and that is only adding to my anxiety.  (And, as we all know, if I could just "relax" I'd get pregnant and stay that way, right?)

"In service" started today at school and it was a day of meetings with depressing statistics about budget cuts.  I'm trying to get excited for the new semester.  So far, it isn't working...