Dream House Hustle

Last night I dreamt that my wife unilaterally made the decision to adopt another child, bringing our total number of children to four. It wasn’t the fact that she acted without consulting me that bothered me, nor was I put off by the idea of having another child. Instead, in the dream, I was angry at Bethany for her ulterior motive for the adoption. Knowing six of us would not fit comfortably in our current, four bedroom house, Dream-Bethany was making a power-play which would force me to agree to buy a bigger house to accommodate our growing family. Even while sleeping, that woman is an evil genius.

I needn’t bother delving into a Freudian analysis of my dream to discover its meaning. For some time now, Bethany has been grumbling about outgrowing our current accommodations. When we bought our house in 1999, we were a family of two. Half of our rooms sat empty and unused for the first year we lived here. But now there are five of us sharing this space, and despite owning ten-acres of Heaven on Earth, our spacious spread doesn’t feel so spacious anymore. Realizing, but not fully admitting, that my evil genius wife was right, I relented and told her that I would consent to buying a bigger house under two conditions: The new house must be in the SoBoCo school district, and Bethany has to be willing to listen to me whine about not wanting to hassle with packing and moving everything we own, not wanting to fill out change of address forms, not wanting to call the satellite people about setting up service in the new house, not wanting to clean our current house from top to bottom in order to make it presentable for selling, not wanting to go into debt again to get a new mortgage, not wanting to rent a car trailer for the rusting hulk of an Impala that’s been parked in our pole barn for the past three years, not wanting to trap our two semi-wild barn cats and moving them, not wanting to say goodbye to the party porch I built with my own two hands, and not wanting to deal with all the unpacking and settling in to a new house. She said, “Deal!” without hesitation. I should have held out for an increase in my beer money allowance. Evil. Genius.

So the house hunt has begun, and I am already starting to whine. I know people pack up and move all the time, but I haven’t had to move in almost fourteen years, and as anyone who knows me at all will tell you, I hate moving. From the day I was born through the day we bought this house, I moved over two-dozen times. When Bethany and I bought this place, our real estate agent predicted that we would move within five years. I told her she was dead wrong and that I never planned on moving again as long as I lived. She laughed and said, “Wait till you start having kids. You’ll see.” Well, as anyone who knows me will also tell you, I can be quite stubborn. I swore a blood oath right then and there to never move, no matter how crowded our house got, just to prove our realtor wrong. “I’ll show her,” I said. Well, I nearly tripled the number of years she thought we would live here, so I guess Madame Smarty Pants Suit’s crystal ball must have been on the blink that day. “You really showed her, babe,” my wife says, in an “if-I-feed-his-ego-he’ll-give-me-what-I-want” sort of way. Well played, evil genius. Well played.