Sharing Space

I was watching reruns of Sex and the City last night with my gay boyfriend -- the man who has graciously let me crash in his spare room for the past six weeks while I turned my life upside down -- and we were laughing at similarities in the plot line to our relationship. Aiden had just moved in with Carrie, and she was having trouble adjusting to being in close quarters with a guy and all his stuff. She chose a night out with her gay boyfriend as an antidote to her troubles at home.

While my GB was reminiscing about all the times we've been each other's safety valve, I was struck more by Carrie's trouble adjusting to sharing her space with the man she loved. It brought back stark memories of when I moved into the bachelor pad. Though we didn't have boxes littering the floor -- I put my things in a storage unit -- we did have serious space issues. I thought they would go away when we moved into our big house, with its four bedrooms and three bathrooms and big kitchen and separate dining room. No such luck.

Even if my husband hadn't been carrying on with the other woman and had been perfectly attentive and in tune with my distress, I was still SO unprepared to live with someone. It had been a long time since I'd had a roommate -- let alone three roommates (if you count his kids, who might as well have been living with us) -- and had gotten used to living in perfect order. It drove me crazy that no one seemed capable of putting anything back where he found it. Though my husband was bad, his eldest -- the child who looked at me like I was talking in Mandarin when I suggested that he clean up the kitchen -- was far worse.

My home had always been my sanctuary, and my husband and his kids turned mine into a place I dreaded going. He sabotaged all my efforts to establish house rules. He wanted to be the cool dad, the parent with whom his kids liked hanging out. Chores, it seems, are terribly uncool. What happened, I wondered, to the man who had been borderline OCD in the bachelor pad?

It took a while to adjust, but over time, we've made our peace at home. When I started traveling and stopped cleaning up after his kids, he realized what slobs they are and started helping me enforce the rules. When I stopped picking his clothes up off the TV room floor, he started realizing how lazy he'd become. When I couldn't help people find things in the house because I didn't know where they were, they started realizing that there was a REASON everything had its place. It's not perfect harmony, but it's better. I still have my moments -- like the last time I was home, I hadn't been there in two weeks, and he didn't seem to notice that the place was a god-awful mess -- but they're fewer and farther between.

Needless to say, I'm grasping at the silver linings that come with setting up a new household. Depending on when the movers come and when my husband finds a job (two more interviews on Monday!), I could be there for a few weeks by myself. Enough time, I hope, to impose my order on things before I start sharing again. Yippee!



The Wife Who Knows