Where are my Keys?

One of the reasons that I do not like to travel, other than my fear of flying, is that I need to have a sense of place to feel at ease. I need to know where everything is (or at least where it should be) and I need to know that tomorrow and the next day, these things will still be in their place.  I cannot live out of a suitcase. The second I check into a hotel room, I immediately empty my bags and the toiletries and put them all in drawers or on counters.  Nothing should be in any kind of carry-all.  It drives me crazy to root through a makeup bag in search of my mascara.

The same kind of thing is true for me at home.  I have a very difficult time sitting down and working on this blog, for example, if the house is in disarray. At the very least, the room that I am in needs to be picked up or I get distracted.  Even in high school and college, I had to be in a neat room in order to effectively do my homework. When my dorm room was a mess, I put on my moon boots, my scarf, gloves, hat and parka and hiked my ass across campus to the library where I could study in the one place that was always neat and orderly.  Make no mistake, I am not a neat freak and I do not have OCD, but I do need to feel that everything is as it should be or I feel…icky.

This need for order must be why I am still feeling ill-at-ease in our new “home” in Wyoming.  We moved here at the end of December, and have yet to acquire an official residence.  Our temporary house is just that, a short-term furnished house that we are to be out of in the next two weeks.  We still haven’t signed off on a new place to live, and our current residence is full of boxes, some opened and others still tightly taped shut. I have no idea where my 2011 calendar, my hairbrush, and my printer are.  Yet every single hat, scarf, coat and boot owned by every person in this family are pouring out of four separate boxes by the front door. In our kitchen, we were supplied with a few pots and pans, some glasses, and a cereal bowl.  Yes, you read that right. One. Single. Bowl.  So, we have several boxes in the kitchen opened and piled high in case we need anything that will make cooking or eating things that we are used to cooking and eating easier and more accessible.  The sad fact is that this scene can be witnessed over and over again in each room of the house.  The bedrooms each have clothing boxes that are open with now unfolded clothes clumped inside. The bathroom has three boxes filled with random toiletries and hair accessories (but not my freakin’ hairbrush).  Then there are the built-ins at the house which merely serve as box houses until we move the boxes again.

With all of these boxes everywhere, my 18 month old is delighted.  She has so much fun pulling shit out of boxes and strewing the contents all around the house.  If I catch her in the act of pulling my curling iron out of a bathroom box, I will try to stop her, to which she smiles, turns away from me and runs giggling with the curling iron cord bouncing behind her like a playful tail.  I can’t get a handle on it.  Toys are everywhere, and there is no “toy box” to put them in at the end of the day.  Recycling is piled up and overflowing because there are no receptacles here to separate the plastics from the cans from the papers (and you have to separate your papers into three categories too!) The only thing that I do daily that gives me a small sense of control is that I make the beds. I feel like, if I made the bed today, I did something that makes the house more homey. I contributed to…something.

I thought that I would be alright for a while as a stay at home mom. However, with no residence to make into a home, and no job to escape to from the situation, I am sinking deeper and deeper into a state of annoyed indifference.  People ask me, “How are you?” and I simply sigh and reply, “Eh.”

I know that it is hard on my husband when he sees that I am not mentally in a good place. After all, this was our DREAM to move here. I should be ecstatic.  But for the time being anyway, it is quite the opposite.  I keep telling him that all I want is for ONE thing to go right.  I want the college to call me about my resume that I sent them regarding adjunct teaching, or for the writing workshop that I attended to not have been a total waste of my time, or that the house we just called about wasn’t already given to someone else sight unseen, or that my keys (to my car, scooter and fireproof lock box) that were left in the Days Inn in Colby, Kansas, where they assured me were mailed to me on December 29th, were not lost in the mail and are in fact in our PO Box right this second.  But none of this is happening, and I don’t know how much more I can take.

I need to shake this feeling of uselessness and focus on some of the positives of our new town.  I try every day to  find something to be happy about.  As stated in my previous post, I know in six moths, everything will be fine. But it doesn’t change my daily blahs as I try to “get through” another day on the edge.