Mortgage

I was talking to my mother on the phone this morning about the usual nonsense and anxieties in my life. I called after a text saying I overdrew our joint bank account. Guess I couldn't make it this month either to disprove her belief that I'm not saving any of my money. She assured me it would be fine, and to be more careful next time, cushioning the overdraft with $200 to avoid fees. I hate letting her down.

Then we dove into what I like to call the "what's hectic this week in your life" section of conversation. I went down the list of my anxieties for her: Dante three page paper in Italian due Friday -- a passage analysis, Spanish three page reseña about the movie Pan's labyrinth, history exam, math exam, work two double shifts and two single shifts, babysitting Thursday night and a doctor appointment that morning at 9am, AND a friend crashing on my couch because his roommate tried to stab him with scissors (probably a drug induced incident). You know, the usual. Well, usual for me. I asked her, "why can't I just get my shit together?"

-"Because you have too much on your plate, that's why." It's not really like any of those things can get taken off my plate right now. Glutton for punishment, pun intended, and as you can see overdrawing bank accounts is not an oddity. As far as the heavy school load, well I see it like this: I took off four years to be crazy and lazy, it's like can I just suck it up and do it? Also, I think because of my anxiety I'm a little masochistic and blame myself for not going back sooner, using heavy work load as a punishment. I'm twenty-six, it's not like I can afford to "lighten" the load if I'd like to get to grad school before thirty.

My mom informed me today that my father had his father's trust dissolved and that they would be using the money to pay off the mortgage. My mind drifted off. Mortgage was a strong trigger of childhood memories. I remember it as a word usually shouted, and preceded by "goddamn," or "second," or "reversed." It was a huge part of the reason my parents fought all the time, and even after a divorce, had always been a recurring theme in their discourse.

My father bounced between a few different career paths during their marriage and at one point even went back to school to be a teacher, a job I always thought he should of stuck with. Most of the financial burden, during the marriage, with four kids in the house, and even after the separation, was on her. She continued to pay the mortgage even after their  divorce proving a certain loyalty to at least one remaining part of their relationship to not fail. It's strange though, imagining a type of assassination, or disappearance, of this word I grew to hate so much.

-"Jenny we need to pay the 'goddamn mortgage.'"

I can  still hear my dad's thunderous voice resonating through the crystal vases, or those dangling chandelier bobbles above the sideboard, like a wind chime or a tuning fork.

"Goddamn mortgage."

It appears that paying off a mortgage, in my jumbled thought process, is the last step to getting your shit together, so I'm happy for them. Unfortunately I miss those roaring moments when my dad had someone to rattle those dangly chandelier bobbles for.

The house of the soon to be paid off mortgage, for years, has been mostly empty. Just him and the dogs, who keep fucking dying, one by one, like he needed any more goddamn space around that place. For the most part the list of noises in that house have gone from kids playing, to kids fighting, to parents fighting, to hearing those 250 year old windows creak and whine from the wind, or the occasional toilet flush.

My brother has moved back in to the house to block out the sting from that wind a little, but it seems the cost of the "goddamn mortgage" was much higher than anyone anticipated. I miss that house and every time I go to visit it seems like pieces of it blow away in the wind, like my special little memories that I never told anyone blowing away like bubbles, out of reach.

It's safe to say that I'm looking forward to my own mortgage some day, after I theoretically graduate from college, and put on my grown up pants, and get a real job where neckties are optional and I don't have to tell you about the daily specials- the goddamn daily specials. Hopefully, if I play my cards right, I'll have my own kids who make memories that they can relive over and over again of a mortgage, even if it is the goddamned kind.