Signing away my dreams

This story actually starts two years ago. My son was half way through his first year of kindergarten and the traffic to get work was starting to make me go insane.

I knew where we lived when we moved there, and I knew getting to work was not great, but it was only when my son started school that I realized there a lot, a lot a lot, of friggin kids in school. And when all of their parents are trying to get to work at the same time, not great is such a gigantic understatement that it still blows my mind on a daily basis.

It was then that I started easing Hubby into the idea of moving closer to work. It took some time, but I finally found a few houses that caught his interest enough to go and look at them.

One house in particular, or should I say one picture of a potential future house caught his eye enough for us to sign a reservation and start to dream. We signed up for the project in June (that’s June 2013…just to be clear). We should have moved in in December. Surprise, that didn’t happen. Not only did it not happen, but in December they hadn’t even started to build the house yet…oh no wait, they hadn’t even started to tear down the existing house to build yet…oh no wait, they cancelled the whole program altogether.

So two years later, I lose my mind on a daily basis trying to get to or from work at the same time as like half the population of France, give or take a few million. Whatever, it’s a buttload of people, and I hate traffic.

In January, we restarted our search, our main criteria, the house must exist. Everything else was negotiable.

Last Friday, we signed over our lives to buy this house. It is beautiful and big, with a big tree filled garden (aka, lots of shade). I love this house, and yet I signed with a pit in my stomach.

A pit the size of a coconut. So maybe that’s a rock, or a lump, but whatever, I signed without feeling the joy I would have thought.

It took some serious soul searching, but I figured it out, I was not only signing up for a house, but a mortgage that will leave us counting pennies at the end of the month for the first year, and therefore we also signed up to keep a stable income.

It’s not that I am unhappy in my job, but I work for a company, not a person, or a cause, but a company, that is to say shareholders. I don’t do anything that really benefits humankind, and I can’t say that I am terribly passionate about the work I do. I don’t find it unpleasant, and I love the people I work with, but when I think of the days when I was contributing to osteoporosis research, man I knew why I got up in the morning.

Now my primary driver is stability. Personal stability. If that statement isn’t a joy killer, I don’t know what is.

I love this house, I really do, and Hubby I do promise to stop complaining…as much, let’s say like 40% less, but I also feel like I just abandoned my dreams of doing something with my life that I really want to do. I don’t exactly have a clear dream in mind, but I do know that even the fuzzy ones are out for the foreseeable future, and that makes me a little sad. I guess I will just have to be sad in my new house that is nearly three times the size of this apartment and a whopping 4 minutes from my office.