Home Sweet (holy hell!) Home

We’ve arrived. We are in our new house in Arizona, which is a house we found on Sabbatical Homes. It’s owners are two gay men with two sons who are away for the year. So we’re pretending to be them until next May. I wonder sometimes what the neighbors think.

Or, rather, I wonder if the neighbors laugh a little (I think I would), when they realize that the two gay men with two sons have been replaced by two lesbians with two daughters. If you smashed us together and then separated us, we could be two “perfects” sets of the “perfect” American family. Instead we’re like a conservative Christians nightmare, times two.

But, anyway, this house is lovely. It has a salt water pool, which we go for a dip in every morning before WE WANT TO KILL OURSELVES BECAUSE OF THE EXTREME HEAT. And then again sometimes in the evening when the SUICIDE-INDUCING EXTREME HEAT abates just a little bit.

Oh, did I mention that it’s kind of hot here? No big deal. Really. It’s only that every time you step outside, you suddenly believe in hell, even if you no longer believe in heaven.

But overall we’re happy. I swear. If we stay inside and bring large jugs of water (in a cooler) with us in the car whenever we venture outside, we’re doing pretty well. And just the other day, the temperature *only* got up to 98, so there is some relief.

And, really, honestly, I’m pretty darn happy. Because I finally have my own place again. And we finally have the girls in daycare again. It was nice being full-time moms for a little while, especially getting to breastfeed Frida all the time instead of having to pump in some closet and then store my milk and ship it off with her to a small padded room filled with cribs and white noise machines (which is to say the infant room in a daycare facility).

But as nice as it was, I missed my time alone. I missed the feeling of being and adult human being who is more than just the spectator at a four-year-old’s experimental dance performance and/or the reader of book after book after book about strange animals doing strange, but age-appropriate and sometimes moral-inducing, things, or–in the case of Frida–a walking milk machine. It was nice to be a person who sits down at a computer and tries to write while her children are way far away somewhere in the desert drinking milk and doing experimental dance performances with other adults who are not me.

It was less nice having to be the adult who then had to drive through the hot desert to retrieve said children. But, hey, these are the sacrifices we makes.

And speaking of said children, apparently yesterday, in Frida’s first day of daycare she followed (aka crawled after) a boy named Theo around everywhere, an equally brutish child who is also equally freakishly blond, and then whenever she got close to him, she’d give him a hug.

That kind of broke my heart.

Here are my dear ones in our new pool:

And here is Frida, caught in the act of brutishly trying to remove all the soil from the gay father’s lovely house plant: