House showings and self knowings

We’re relisting. The house didn’t sell last fall so we’ve waited six months and now, here we go again.

And I feel…I feel…I couldn’t put my finger on it as I sat across from M at lunch. He waited for a moment in silence and then said, “Like you’re standing out there naked.”

Exactly! In fact, that’s precisely how I’ve felt all four times we’ve put a house up for sale. (The other two houses and this one twice.) I was surprised that M felt it too, but maybe it’s just that obvious. You’re about to expose yourself, let one stranger after another come traipse through your home. They’ll rate your housekeeping skills and your taste in art. They’ll peek in your cabinets. Use your toilet. They’ll judge everything about your most private space and probably make assumptions about you to boot. They’re there to evaluate the house, sure, but how can you not feel, at least a little, that they’re judging you?

Especially me. My identity is tied to my house. Even here, where we’ve lived just over a year. I haven’t had time to really make it mine. But that’s just it. I don’t make a house mine. The house is me. This is what I’ve come to realize, though I don’t know if I become the house or the house becomes me. When does it happen? How does it happen? Unclear. The feeling is weaker for this house and the last one. But my deep, seemingly never-ending grief for our first house, the house we were in for twenty years, is because I am still that house (or it is me?), even now, six years later.

I’m writing this outside. The weather has been absolutely insane. It’s the end of February in Illinois and it’s 71 degrees. The daffodils and bulbs have been making themselves known for a week or so and today I noticed one of them has bloomed. It’s a burst of yellow, alone in the still mostly brown front bed.

So I suppose if this house is me at all, that bold little flower has to be me as well, at least to some degree. Hard to fathom. It sometimes seems my fragility and uncertainty are all there is to me. I feel very little like a brave burst of sunniness and yet there it is. Accept it. I can push away the debris that’s in my way. I still know how to blossom. So, yeah, let them all come and look. I’m going to believe in my shine.