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AustinMama offers up some Daddy props.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Open House
“No good deed ever goes unpunished.” I’m not sure where I first
heard
it said, nor how many times I’ve sneered at the sentiment, but it’s
with an ironic smile that I think about that misanthropic aphorism
today. I started to write a different column at least twice this week, but
in keeping the spirit of exhibitionistic life display that regular
readers have come to expect, I will tell you the story that overshadows
all others in my attention right now. Buckle up.
N and D are friends of ours. I’ve known them for two years and
change,
maybe three, and Janice and D go back significantly farther than that.
Their daughter R is about six months older than Keefe and a real
treasure, and both boys like them immensely. Last year they had a long
drawn out and unnecessarily unpleasant battle with their then-landlord
and some close friends of his, who lived in the apartment above them.
It’d take a few pages to get into the details, but suffice it to say there
was some misplaced aggression, religious persecution, false charges
laid with the police, and unnecessary visits from children’s aid.
The
toll it took on this nice family in the middle of it was horrible, and
it broke our hearts to see them being attacked like that, vindictively
and without any apparent purpose.
J and L are also friends of ours. We’ve known them for about a
decade,
and their daughters A and A are the same ages as Keefe and Hugh, and
also very close friends. I’ve grown extremely fond of their one-year-old son T, who, like me, is the last child of three, the only boy, and
the astrological sign cancer. They purchased a new home in the late
spring and juggled the financing so that they could keep their old
home for at least a while -- partly because they already had so
much on their plate that getting the old house ready for resale seemed
a monumental undertaking, and also because they wanted to help N and D
get out of the toxic situation they were in. They rented their old
house to N and D, which seemed like an elegant solution to everyone,
and for a brief time, everyone was happy. With Hugh’s entering grade
one and therefore spending full days in school, I started looking for
some sort of flexible employment to arrest our continual slide slowly
into greater debt, and agreed to provide occasional care for baby T
while his mother returned to her work as a midwife.
Are you with me so far?
Then, as Keats predicts in the famous poem, things fell apart. Mostly,
it was inter-family communication skills that seem to have gone first.
N and D had a surprise stutter in their finances which quickly put them
in arrears to J and L in rent, and the lack of communication and follow
up started to sour the mood of their friendship. N and D complained of
a problem with mold growing in the basement of the house they were now
renting, and felt that their concerns about it representing a possible
health hazard fell on unsympathetic ears. They started to get sick.
J
and L suggested that they’d had no obvious ill effects from their four
years in the house, and could we get back to the discussion about how
we were trying to help you out by renting to you so why did we only
find out your checks bounced after the fact from the bank? Toes got
stepped on. Tones got unpleasant. Eventually, things came to a
head.
One of N and D’s pets died, and they hit the panic button.
Us.
Now what does one do when a friend calls you up in a blind panic
because they believe a toxin in their environment is killing them? We
invite them over. The middle bedroom grows three extra tenants, their
dog and cat start working out a pecking order with our two cats, and we
anticipate a certain amount of extra clutter. It’s hardly the first
time we’ve opened our house like this. Three different young men in
our extended community lived with us for several months apiece within
the last few years, and Jan’s position as a high school teacher brings
us occasional stray teens, such as the drama student she found sleeping
on a bench behind the school last week because he’d had a fight with
his step-dad and been kicked out. He got the futon in the third floor
playroom for a few days while tempers cooled and added another face to
our crowded house. Not to mention the usual flood of friends and
acquaintances that we’re still seeing, such as Keefe’s friend Benjamin
who came for a sleepover visit we’d planned before all of this chaos.
Neighborhood children also come by to join in the water balloon fights
in front of the house and end up staying for dinner as well. It’s at
least slightly insane, but you can’t say it isn’t interesting.
It’s as
if the whole village it takes to raise a child is determined to move in
with us directly.
But it’s that village, or at least the sense of community that we’ve
worked so hard to create among like-minded local families, that’s
gotten chewed up by this entire awkward narrative. Because we’re
close
friends with both families, we tell them we don’t want to be put in the
middle, but we want to compassionately offer support. J and L suggest
that they feel there’s a serious breach of trust in the handling of
matters by N and D, but they understand that we’ve invited them here
because we want to help them out as friends, and certainly don’t want
to hold that against us. Will N and D living here mean that my
arrangement with J and L to watch baby T is in jeopardy? They don’t
see why it should, if things are at least amicable and polite in
communications between them, as they work towards resolving the issues
of money owed, mold in the house, hurt feelings and miscommunications.
We respectfully tell N and D that we aren’t going to ask them for rent
or pressure them about a departure date, but that the one thing we need
for this not to adversely affect us is for them to keep their
negotiations civil and mutually respectful.
Next comes the science lesson, and it’s about as easy to follow as
calculus was back in high school with the mean spirited demoralizing
teacher I had the year that my first lover was pregnant and later
became sick and I couldn’t care a tinker’s cuss for my marks because I
was freaking out completely. Because they were still arguing over
whether the mold in the house was a health problem or the cause of the
poor cat’s demise, N brought in an engineer who specializes in mold
problems to take spore samples at the plague house. J was in
attendance with this guy Gord who had already done various work for
them as a handyman because he figured that if drywall would need
replacing or what have you that Gord would be the guy to do it, so he
might as well be there to hear what the expert had to say directly.
Gord apparently spent a good chunk of time calling N seven kinds of
auxiliary anus, J was silent because he felt blindsided by N’s
presentation, complete with digital pictures of mold growing in his
house that he’s never seen before or been informed of the existence of,
the engineer wrote them off as hostiles, and the general blur of
recriminations smeared everyone’s lens further. Because N pays the
engineer for his time, he is now unable to pay J rent once again, and
with three months of arrears rent owing, J serves him with eviction
papers, asking them to settle accounts within two weeks or remove their
possessions. When the lab comes back with test results, the engineer
tells N and D they shouldn’t be in the house without biohazard suits,
and they can expect to spend up to ten thousand dollars for the
decontamination of their possessions before they are safe to move.
Apparently there are a handful of potentially very hazardous varieties
among the thousands of molds that can infect a house, and, like pollen
or bee stings, they can affect some people much more strongly than
others. A broad sheaf of documents makes its way to J and L.
They
consult with two of the different companies recommended in the report,
and a representative from one of them performs some sort of
detoxification of the mold-affected basement and states that he’s
prepared to legally certify the building safe. He also suggests that
cleanup of the house contents should be a fairly straightforward
process without a significant price tag. Now we have two experts
differing wildly in their assessments, J and L feel they’ve dealt with
the problem in good faith, and N and D still believe their health is in
serious jeopardy without decontamination they cannot remotely afford.
Now at this point, I have to soapbox. While the news is rife with
images of floating bodies and devastation in hurricane-hammered New Orleans, I think of this mold colony in my friends’ house as a more
intimate breed of natural disaster. Sometimes that means ordinary
people getting shot as looters because they haven’t got anything to
feed their kids and they’re trying to find some at a half drowned
grocery store, and sometimes it means people pulling together, like us,
to share their homes and resources with those displaced or orphaned by
forces beyond their control. Sometimes you work together because
it’s
nailed all of you and surviving seems easier together, and sometimes
your neighbor is the obstacle between you and that can of beans. It
can really go either way. With these initials I’ve been bandying
about
here, it seems to me that these tiny spores swept unforeseen upon them,
and it could have brought them closer together seeking solutions to it.
Both families feel the exact same thing: they’re threatened, angry,
feel disregarded or not listened to, and deeply resent the hostility
they’re getting from the other side. Both of them pretty clearly
want
to hear an apology and see their concerns being addressed. As an
outsider, it all seems fairly simple to me. So, three weeks into this
change in our living arrangements, are things any better? No.
With
all the careful forethought of cornered animals, messages have
progressed to name-calling, hyperbole, and personal attacks on each
other’s character.
I’m not proposing solutions. Really, it isn’t my problem, although
I
am fooling myself if I claim that we’ve avoided the middle of this.
What is my problem is keeping my family as together as possible
throughout this whole process. It’s impossible not to pick up on
some
of the emotional volatility all of this engenders, and every one of us
has had moments of being more explosive. We’ve also had a few
wonderful moments together here and there, and I am enjoying the good
weather, my bicycle, and available daytime by meeting Janice and the
boys for lunch at their respective schools to refresh our connections
pleasantly. Keefe in particular, being more conscious of the
underlying issues folk are facing, seems to be finding some perspective
on the relative importance of the PS2 he wants in the face of possibly
watching these families we know possibly lose everything. Cooking for
eight or ten is familiar enough, and feeling this crowded is work, but
wow are we providing our sons an example that we believe compassion
trumps convenience. Outside friends alternate between telling me I’m
insane and telling me I’m a saint. “Oh, that’s easy” I tell
them, “I’m
insane, Janice is the saint. So you see, you’re both right.”
Want to know just how insane? Next week is Keefe’s birthday, with a
ten-tween sleepover planned, including representatives from both of the
warring families, and we’re still going to attempt it. Then a few
weeks later, at the end of October, there’s already a standing
invitation to not only everyone mentioned above, but two more families
as well for our feast of the dead. Stay tuned.
______________
Michael Nabert is a Canadian writer who loves to talk and sing, and writes mainly about
parenting, the art of wooing and paleontology. Widely traveled, with an opinion about everything, his friends often describe him as having
"a
deplorable excess of character." He is currently stay-at-home dad to Hugh
and Keefe.
