A Dream House

     I’ll never forget the day my Grandfather died. My mother and I were on our way to California to visit him, and we were somewhere in Oregon if memory serves. We heard the phone ring, and I remember picking it up to answer. I don’t remember what my cousin said to me that day, all I remember is the urgency, and Rhee pulling over into a Rest stop to answer. That’s when we heard. It wasn’t unexpected, he’d been battling health issues for some time, and had been depressed for decades. It had also been a little over a year since my Grandmother died. Without her, he pretty much had no one. He couldn’t walk very far, had to be on oxygen, minimal contact with anyone who wasn’t his family. He was also the kind of person who a total stranger would find interesting, but someone close to would find despicable. His children loved him, but did not like him, and I straight up hated him. I don’t want to say that I was excited for his death, but I thought it would alleviate all my problems if I didn’t have to see him every Christmas and summer. 

     My grandfather left us enough money to buy a house, and since we lived in housing owned by the county at the time, my mother immediately set about finding us a new place to live. I knew it was coming. I wouldn’t say that I felt excited, but I did feel relieved. Our apartment complex had a whole host of issues, from remodeling woes to poor management, that had led to a general feeling that the only reasonable course was to get out of there as fast as possible. We took our time house-hunting though, wanting to find the perfect place. And we found it, or thought we did. 

     Our first contractor scammed us out of a bunch of money. Our second contractor did his best, but there were so many problems that I have doubts as to his skill, but it was my mother’s first time renovating a house and she didn’t want to find anyone else. We hoped to stay in our apartment until our house was renovated, but it took so long that we had to move in anyways. When the remodeling was complete, we kept finding issues. Finishing on the cabinets breaking, minor plumbing issues, stuff that might not have been related to the remodel but didn’t raise the house in our eyes. It’s gotten to the point that my mother says that when she retires, we’re moving somewhere else. 

     I’m a writer, so naturally this house has become something of a symbol for me. It’s a representation of what I like to think of as failed optimism. 2014 was a time of hope for me. I was in college studying for a major I thought I’d like. I was doing well in school, I wouldn’t have to see my grandfather anymore, and we’d soon be out of the crummy apartment we were living in. As the years went by, I flunked a lot of courses (in part because I didn’t know how to study), I figured out I couldn’t make it in the major I started with, and we were stuck in the apartment for years. I eventually flunked so badly I had to quit college, and the house turned out to be a major disappointment. A lot of work, and while it was in a nice part of town it didn’t fix our growing list of complaints about the town itself. This house, therefore, is a representation of the hopes I had in my early college years, hopes that wouldn’t pan out. 

     Unlike my mother, I don’t want to leave. I thought that when my grandfather died, all of our problems would be fixed. We’d have a nice house, money to pay for college (I was taking out student loans at the time), and be able to do things other than visit relatives twice a year. Ten years on, I know that while it fixed some issues, it created a lot of new ones. I don’t want this house to just represent all the ways my mother and I failed to achieve our dreams I want it to represent the ways in which we made it work out in the end. I don’t want to run away from our problems this time. I don’t know if this is where we’re meant to be, but I know we won’t find where we’re meant to go by running from place to place. I want to leave after I find myself and know where I belong. More importantly, I want to leave this house as a person who doesn’t try to solve her problems by wishing them out of existence. My grandfather shouldn’t have had to die for me and my mother to be happy. Even if it had fixed our problems, it’s not something that should have had to happen.