domestication

On my continuing journey towards something dimly resembling adulthood, I have begun searching for a home to buy.

The rent v. buy question is a tricky one.  When I first got married, the future was fluid, and the answer was easy:  rent, rent, rent.  That turns out to have been a good decision, since my rent hasn't gone up in over seven years, and anyway I had no money when I got married.  Now I've got some paper, and I'm ready to feel like I don't have any again.  I could keep renting, but in my area the cost to rent is rather exorbitant for the kind of larger place I'd be looking for.  The kind of place where you can comfortably raise a family.

So I'm looking at mortgages.  I'm looking at down payments.  I'm looking at school districts.  This is an exquisite form of personal torture for someone who regards himself as fundamentally Bohemian in outlook.  Like a certain Mr. Draper, the opportunity to just pack up and ship out at a moment's notice has always held great appeal, even if I've never actually made use of it.  I like to categorize my possessions, and one of those categories is 'must-haves,' things I would be sure to take with me when I need to escape from my life.  There are precious few of those.  I would not be found.

But I'm not ready to run yet, and instead I'm about to nail myself to the floor.  I can handle that.  It's for my daughter's good, and creating her endows me with certain inalienable obligations as far as making her experience of living however slightly less miserable I can.

The wife and I went house-hunting a few weeks ago.  We visited an open house near where we live currently, and it was a beautiful place!  It felt clean, and open, and beautiful, and spacious, and livable.  I looked around, and could imagine a pretty fun life there.  It was expensive, but within the realm of affordability.  It was doable in every way.

I was ready to pull the trigger, but (as always) the wife was a little more cautious.  We talked about it, and decided we needed to look at more than one house before making a decision.  That seems reasonable.  That seems safe.  That seems wise.  That flies completely in the face of how I like to approach life, and I've been very successful at it so far.

Places have never been extremely important to me.  In my eyes, a place is merely a forum to interact with people, which is what really matters in life.  I can be comfortable living somewhere, or uncomfortable living somewhere.  I don't care at all, as long as I've got the right people around me.

The wife feels differently.  Places have always been extremely important to her.  The feel of a place needs to be just right, she claims, or she simply cannot be happy.  All my appeals to the idea that we would be happy just from being together fell on deaf ears.  Above all, we must find the right kind of place.  Well-lit.  Boreally orientated.  Properly ventilated.  Aloof neighbors.  Thick floorboards.  Situated on an ancient burial ground.  You get the picture.

A home of my own is more than a place to live and meet people, I admit.  But it opens up an entire world of new responsibilities, opportunities, and fantastical engagements, should I choose to pursue them.  An entire arcane laboratory, all to my own design, if I should so choose.  The wonderment would be never-ending.  The dead might live again.

These are some of the ways I could cope with the idea of buying a house.  I'm terrified by my regular middle-class lifestyle, terrified of collapsing into a perfect family unit of perfectly average composition, forming a singularity of suburban bliss.  It would be happy, but there seems to be so little room to carve out something new for yourself on that all-too-traveled road.  Tell me, where can I find the novelty in always doing what I'm supposed to do?  Where can I find the challenge when I hew so close to the middle road?

I don't want a house that I can go back to and be content.  I want a house that will constantly push me back out into the world, and force me to keep on growing.