“Oh crap!”
Those are two words you really don’t want to hear your husband shout out when he’s loading up the car you’re going to be living out of for the next month or so. But unfortunately, while Lou is excellent at so many things, packing, sorting, organizing, and spatial planning are not in that mix.
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that every time Lou took a load out to the rental car, I heard some version of an expletive as he tried to wedge all of our things into the back of our new “home” — which was a brand new Ford Explorer. It still had that awesome “new car” smell; and, the front floorboards had a glorious protective plastic covering on the mats! (For me, this little detail was helping me make the very best out of a bad situation.)
Let me just tell you, shoving your entire life into your rental SUV is tricky — even if Lou isn’t your packing helper. The only thing I knew for sure is that we’d be in the car a lot, and I didn’t want to have to unload the whole back end just to find the bag that had my toothbrush in it. So I spent a lot of mental energy trying to figure out how to organize and pack every bag so we could easily access what we needed, and so that our clothing wouldn’t get too wrinkled.
(Fate decided that I wasn’t meant to travel with my iron. On the last day of packing up our condo, this object of my greatest affection took a nosedive off of the ironing board and cracked. I literally had to stop and grieve.)
But Lou seems to have one objective when it comes to loading a storage unit or an SUV: just get it all in there somehow.
That approach will never work for me, as I’m sure you gathered. Clearly, Lou and I have some philosophical differences when it comes how to be organized. But to be completely fair to Lou, I’ve created my own monster. Because things like tidiness matter so much to me, I never ask Lou to be in charge of any part of our lives that can benefit from my strongest skill set. As a result, the way Lou finds things in his daily life pretty much amounts to him saying:
“Baby. Where are my panty-britches?”
Or…
“Baby. Where did you put my shirt with that logo on it?”
Even a vague request such as that one is easily recalled by yours truly. In the best of circumstances, I always know where Lou’s underwear is, or where I hung up his golf shirt with the Liquid Golf logo on it. It’s my thing, and I love being in control of stuff like that. But when I’m stressed, I have an amplified need to be on top of every detail in my world. And… I get a little wired!
So eventually, Lou had to BACK. AWAY. FROM THE VEHICLE.
Once I got the SUV organized exactly how it should be, I was ready to hit the road. I couldn’t wait to leave. I wanted to see Sarasota in the rearview mirror right away. The only trouble was, we were still waiting on the product from the MLM company to arrive, and we’d already given the keys to our condo back to our landlord. So we couldn’t squat at our old place even if we wanted to (which Lou did. Me? Not so much…)
I just wanted to be anywhere but Sarasota.
It’s one thing to spend the night with a friend who doesn’t live in your hometown. People entertain out of town guests all the time. But when you try to find a place to stay with your local network of friends, it just feels wrong for some reason. When you’re an adult — and you’re married — you don’t have sleepovers at your friend’s house anymore. It’s obviously frowned upon in our culture. So trying to figure out who to ask for a place to stay felt… Weird. It was an added layer of awkward on top of an already awkward situation, and I hated it.
And. It was my first reality check that Lou and I were officially homeless.
Eventually, Lou asked a good buddy from the gym if we could stay with him for a night. Whew. He said yes. But I don’t think he cleared it with the wife…
Erg.
So that night was pretty uncomfortable. Plus, I wasn’t very good at explaining what we were up to. The questions — and this need I always have to provide answers about my life to people — made me feel so shaky and embarrassed. I bumbled and stumbled around with my answers, and I tried so hard to channel my inner Pee Wee Herman — “we meant to do this!” I’m terrible at faking my feelings, and even though I was trying, no one seemed to be buying my bluff.
When you’re in your 40’s (and in Lou’s case, 60’s) you don’t start living out of your car on purpose! And likely because I couldn’t get comfortable with how I felt about our reality, it didn’t seem like other people were feeling very good about it either.
But Lou was awesome at handling all of the questions.
That’s probably because Lou actually believed that we were “on purpose” with our road trip plans. He’d say, “We’re burning our ships and jumping in to sell this anti-aging skincare product!” He was pumped. (I guess it could’ve been those testosterone shots…) But in truth, Lou is always excited to promote and sell things.
Lou’s enthusiasm about anything he does is the honest by-product of being a naturally optimistic and hopeful person. He genuinely loves people, and they love him right back. So I’m sure it never occurred to Lou to think that we couldn’t make this work.
For me… I really couldn’t find the words to explain what we were doing because I didn’t want to sell wrinkle cream! I’m not an MLM person, and the thought that I was about to become one was pretty difficult for me to face. So many things were changing in my life so quickly, and I could hardly catch up with my reality in a way that made sense to me. So when I didn’t have what I felt like was a good enough answer to help other people frame up my life, it reminded me that I didn’t have the words for myself either…
But thankfully we made it through the first night as homeless vagabonds without incident.
It was the following morning when things started to really go off the rails for me.
Lou woke up to an email confirmation that the products that were being shipped to us went out later than expected, and they in fact wouldn’t arrive for another two days! (It was my turn to shout, Oh crap!) I was so raw and emotional after such a huge push to get our life reduced and ready to roll that I felt weepy and overly emotional when Lou said we needed to find a place to stay for two more nights.
I just remember sitting in the front seat of the SUV, crying to my sister on the phone. I unloaded a lot on her during that call — I’d been trying so hard to keep it together, and to put on a brave face. Leaving my home and the life I knew was its own kind of awful. But being delayed felt even worse because I only had so much strength left, and it was quickly draining out of me.
As I was complaining about everything to my sister over the phone, I remember saying, “I just want to leave this place. I don’t want to stay another two nights with another friend! We have so many other people outside of Sarasota that we could be imposing on right now!”
The moment the words came out of my mouth, my sister and I both started laughing.
