Apropos of news that nearly 1 in 4 US mortgages is underwater, and the terrible choices facing a growing number of American homeowners...
Apropos of news that nearly 1 in 4 US mortgages is underwater, and the terrible choices facing a growing number of American homeowners...
Recent economic disasters eviscerated my husband's small business. Can't make payroll, can't pay bills, gotta close up shop. My husband began socking money away in his twenties, started a business at 40 and now, in his 48th year, it's gone. All of it. It's one of the saddest things I have ever witnessed.
Plans for retirement, helping grandkids through college, easing peacefully, ordinarily, into old age—gone. We no longer talk about the future, look forward with anything like optimism or cheer; we plan for the worst. We get through the day. Cheerful around the kids, exhausted and vacant when we're alone. Each evening we maintain our routine, sitting together in a living room we may not occupy just weeks from now. We live in the shadow of inevitable bankruptcy and the promise of foreclosure.
Our marriage is in abeyance, somewhere else, not this place, waiting for us to reclaim it after the numbing business of getting on with things has been gotten on with. My husband, Jim, and I don't have much in common, deal with things in very different ways, but he makes me laugh and when I smell his skin I feel safe, so I dial down my anger, my terror, my disappointment and watch television, laugh with the kids and wait for better days.
It’s a dimly lit place we occupy; we can’t see what’s coming. We aren’t alone, I know, and yet we feel isolated, unnoticed, as if, despite all the news to the contrary, the rest of the world is moving along swimmingly and we’ve missed something. I inquired about a loan at my bank the other day and it became clear that I cannot afford this loan because I do not have the proper down payment. I’ve been turned down for loans before. At those times I’ve made some adjustments and tried again. No big deal. This time was different.
I left the bank not with a plan for getting what I wanted, but with a sense of failure, a bit teary and embarrassed. It occurred to me then that what binds so many of us these days are the deeply personal experiences of this economic collapse that we cannot share with others—the stress on our marriages, damage to our self-esteem, the shame.
I sat in the bank parking lot, sweating in my parka, under the winter sun and cursing my choices. "This is what I get," I thought, "for throwing my lot in with someone else’s." Calculatedly single for fifteen years, I’d raised my kids alone, bought my own home and was on the way to putting my first child through college when I met my husband. Blending lives made me unhappy, nervous, distrustful. I feared that pairing up meant that I wasn’t capable of doing things on my own, that in marrying I’d caved to social pressure, given up a kind of renegade status. And my proof? I am now a positively ordinary marker of this economic era: a wife/mother trying to save the family home. Tethered to a mortgage, I am now sinking with the larger economy.
How mundane, prosaic; how married I’ve become.
I’m angry, and if I’m honest it’s not just a matter of ideology. I got married because I fell in love. At the unlikely age of 42, I fell in love and wanted to share my life with someone for the first time. It’s a sign of hope that we marry, right? An indication of trust in not only an institution, but also one another. The same goes for buying a house.
We secure loans in good faith in order "to put down roots," as my grandfather used to say. Mortgages are commitments, often very long-term commitments, and we agree to their terms because we assume we will meet them in the same manner (indeed, at the same time) as we meet our obligations to our spouses, children, families. In our houses we experience the ordinary joys and miseries of life together: birthday parties, arguments, reconciliations, ailing parents, sick kids, anniversaries, graduations, deaths and births. Homes are intimate, they hold our secrets, store our memories, our failures and our recoveries. We wouldn’t dare open other people’s drawers, or snoop through cabinets for this reason; it’s a violation of trust and a transgression against intimacy.
So while my husband and I huddle over our laptops, researching the art of re-negotiating mortgages and scanning the news for any hint that Obama’s recovery efforts will redound to us, I find myself trying not to look around my house. Thankful for the distraction of my laptop, I study our options every evening, eyes down. For I don’t want to lay eyes on my daughter’s piano or my son’s bicycle, framed pictures or worn rugs. What will we take with us? What will we have to leave behind? At times it’s simply too much. Indeed, most of the time.
That institutional greed and systemic carelessness can cost so many their homes, their life savings, reveals the danger of relying on the very social mythology I keenly avoided for all those years. I never trusted in the promises of others, resisted putting myself in anyone else’s hands. Yet here I am in a situation beyond my control precisely because one of our cultural myths appeals so profoundly to so many of us—the idea of a home. And I find myself betrayed. By those I entrusted to work for the greater good, to protect the country’s economic well-being.
My family and I did not choose nor create this awful mess; that was done by forces much larger than us. Yet it’s in our private lives, the small spaces of our days, where we pay the price.
My husband and I divorced a year after I wrote this...