Finding Another Way

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Once we took our house off the market, I could focus on Mom, who had cancer. It was a great blessing to be able to spend extra time with her, walking through every stage of uncertainty, testing, trauma and pain as her life narrowed. In one of our many bedside chats, Mom said, “You know, Honey, you and Nate could probably sell your house without a realtor. We’ve done that four times. Why don’t you try it?”

Mom died in April, 2005. In May we needed to get the house back on the market and so followed her advice. We knew shoving a sign into the ground that said “For Sale By Owner” wouldn’t do much, since we were on a cul-de-sac, absent of drive-by value.

So we bought “Fizz-bo” (FSBO) signs and posted them at every nearby corner with arrows directing traffic flow to our address. We also made five-page packets describing our house and all its stats, complete with a dozen pictures. Once people turned onto our short street, they could see the clear plastic box of info next to the sign, beckoning them to take one.

Something else we did was lower the price of our home by 5%. After all, there would be no real estate commission when we sold it ourselves. Maybe a lower price would attract a new category of house hunters.

Over the next few weeks, as I worked in the kitchen keeping one eye out the window, an encouraging parade of drive-by vehicles moved past our house, stopping at the box of descriptive packets. As each person took one, I waved, smiled and thought, “Mom was right. This time it’s going to work.”

Quite a few families called and then toured our de-cluttered, squeaky-clean home. To go the extra mile, we held an open house every Sunday afternoon, locking the dog in the car and chatting with lookers by the hour. But an unproductive trend emerged. Most of those potential buyers had no potential. They fell into two categories: 1) “tire-kickers” wanting a peek, and 2) families visiting open houses as free entertainment.

About this time, Nate began clipping articles from newspapers that detailed a slight negative downturn in the real estate bubble. Several columnists predicted real estate doom as pie-in-the-sky prices were forced back “to reality.” Little did we know how far we still were from reality.

As the downward trend continued, we made the difficult decision to lower our price another 4%, spending hours discussing the issue. As a matter of fact, the sale of our house was all we ever talked about.

Falling into the “if only” trap produced days of hopelessness in both of us. Our kids begged to talk about something else, anything else, at the dinner table. And finally we declared a moratorium on talk of house and financial problems, at least while we ate. It was difficult to comply with the new rule, probably because it’s hard to fight fear.

When we lowered the price on the house for the second time, we printed new info sheets, noticing that we’d topped the one-thousand mark in our copies. One thousand people had removed packets from the plastic box on our front lawn, and still we hadn’t had a bite.

Even subtracting the months we’d been off the market when Mom was ill, the house had been for sale well over a year. Most of that time our suburb was, as the realtor put it, “Hot, hot, hot!” But by this time, our hope had grown cold, cold, cold.

Let’s play “Cut the Cake!”

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My family spent a great deal of time at the beach when I was growing up, a sandy, dunes-style beach on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore. Mom was untiring in her efforts to make sure we had fun there. “The more the merrier” was a motto she embraced, which meant we could invite all the friends we wanted, whether for a day or a week. She never complained about youthful crowds. To the contrary, she was energized by them.

After we arrived at the beach with our big, black, truck inner-tubes (the kind that rubbed black onto our bathing suits), Mom was always first into the water, teaching visitors to stand on their heads by going under without holding their noses. She made her shoulders available for kids nearly as big as she was to jump from. She raced us all to the anchored raft “out deep” where no one could touch bottom.

Mom never brought a magazine or a book to the beach. Her first choice was to play with children. One of the beach games Mom loved was “Cut the Cake.” Using a bucket for a mold, she turned out a cake of wet sand that was perfectly round. “Go find stones to decorate it,” she directed, “and bring something for the middle, a feather, a stick, whatever you want to make it pretty.”

We “sugared it” with the soft, dry sand and then stood back to admire our work. “Now,” she said, “we’re going to cut the cake.” With a thin stick found in the dunes nearby, she demonstrated what she meant by slicing a piece of sand-cake thin enough not to disturb the rest of it.

Handing the stick-knife to the nearest child, she said, “Your turn. If the cake falls when you slice it, you have to run up and down the dunes five times (or run into the water and stay under 30 seconds, or carry someone on your back anywhere they want to go, etc).

Each person took turns slicing a tiny bit more of the cake while the sun slowly dried the wet sand, increasing the threat of “a fall.”  At long last, someone’s slice caused the remaining cake to crumble, causing hoots and hollers from those who hadn’t lost1 the game. Mom always laughed the hardest.

The sands of time ran out for Mom, but she left behind her spirit of fun for our grandkids to enjoy. Last week I taught a child how to make a bucket cake. (Use only wet sand, pack it tight at the bottom, pile sand slightly above the rim, flip it fast). As I watched him struggle to master this “baking” task, I thought of Mom. She left a lofty heritage in many categories, and surely one of them was how to experience joy among children by playing “Cut the Cake.”

Over and under

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Having kids can put life over the top. Overworked, overstimulated, overwhelmed and overboard, which is where a mom often wants to jump. Simultaneously she feels very much under it all. Underappreciated, underpaid, undermined and under water, which is where she’d be if she jumped.

Is there any middle-mothering between over and under? The truth is, most of our days fall somewhere inbetween. It’s just that having kids, being a mom, can toss us to either extreme in a flash. We know it, and we fear it.

In our family, each time I became pregnant, I puzzled over how another kiddie-commitment could possibly fit into our over-the-top lives, especially the part about stretching the love we felt for the ones we already had, to cover over another.

But children, when they arrive, seem to come pulling a wagon load of the extra everything that will be needed, an over-abundance of flexibility, of energy and especially of love. It’s one of motherhood’s wonderful surprises.

As we plug away at mommy-hood, riding the waves of over and under, we can sometimes be overtaken by good things, too. Overworked and overwhelmed might morph into overflow, i. e. an abundance of whatever we need at the moment. Underappreciated and undermined can transform into understanding, i.e. wisdom of how best to handle a confusing situation.

Whether children are newborns or fully-grown, our challenge to sink or swim as moms will always be with us. When we get nervous about that, it’s good to look for those positive overs and helpful unders. If we see them, the wild ride of motherhood becomes a joy, sometimes even making us overjoyed.