Boarded to Tears

My mom is basically running a boarding house. Since about six months after she built the place there's been a steady stream of people in and out--family members, church folks and even distant friends of acquaintances waiting to take over one of the "spare" rooms for low-cost or, depending on how down and out they are, no-cost rent. I moved out and into my own apartment in the first place because sharing the house with so many people overwhelmed me (not to mention annoyed the crap out of me). But then I got down on my own luck and ended up forced to move back home. That was only supposed to last until I graduated college and got a good job; but, well, it's taken me two years past graduation to find said good job, and even it's not officially permanent yet. And so, going on six years later, I'm still here.

Most of those years have been a rare oasis of relative peace and quiet, with just my mom and I and, surprisingly, no tenants. My brother and his family lived next door, so they were there all the time, but eventually they would go home and things would be peaceful again. But then my brother and his wife moved to be closer to his job, leaving my adult-but-not-yet-graduated nephew behind at our house to finish out the school year. Now he's graduated and, instead of going to live with his parents or moving out on his own, is looking for a job so that he can start paying rent on his room.

Around the same time they moved, a friend of my mom's, who was going through the kind of divorce which to call "nasty" would be putting a positive spin on things, moved into the guest room. She stayed until about six months ago, when she felt confident enough to establish her independence and step out on her own.

This was about the time I came up with the plan for Matt to move in and take over her room. It was a solid plan. He was just making ends meet and was having trouble saving up for his part of the wedding costs, he hated his apartment and the people running it, I hated that seeing him and working meant never getting to be home; and if, as we'd already decided, we were going to live in my upstairs apartment and obsessively save money for the first couple years of our marriage, we might as well get the moving part over with before getting overwhelmed with wedding stuff. And so he did.

He had a hard time adjusting at first, what with a "houseful" consisting of me, my mom and my nephew being pretty overwhelming to a single child who's never even had that much roommate experience. He was starting to have second thoughts about our plan to stay put long enough to pay off some credit cards and save up a downpayment for a house of our own. "We have to get out of here soon" became his mantra. But then he started to get used to things and the sensibility of sticking to our plan once again outweighed his discomfort.

But now.

But now.

But now my aunt and her grandson have moved in, never mind that the house was all out of spare rooms. No, they've packed themselves, their parakeet and their entire houseful of stuff into our closed in back porch, the room that was previously relegated to housing seldom-used exercise equipment and the dogs whenever we needed to shut them away from company. That's where they'll be sleeping until after the wedding when Matt moves upstairs and frees up the guest room. Now, this wouldn't be so bad, but for one thing: my cousin. Not the grandson, mind, but his mother. She is... look, I don't like to gossip publicly about family, so I'm just going to say that she's a fairly useless human being, and leave it at that. She hasn't moved in, necessarily, yet, but she's staying there a lot, enough so that she can point to it and say "See? I'm there for my kid. I haven't completely abandoned him."

So. The point is, the house is overflowing with people, and has surpassed my threshold of being able to deal. I want the hell out. So does Matt. Our sensible financial, eventual-house-buying plan doesn't seem worth the price of our sanity. Looking at several cute and cozy rental houses and duplexes this morning on Craigslist--a pretty unwise thing to do right now, considering--is only fueling the fire. Trouble is, Matt still needs to finish his degree, preferably before I'm too old to have babies, which means he'll need to work less, or possibly not at all for a while, which means money will be tight, which means that we're stuck. Or at least that we have to make a choice: staying put to accomodate his education, or moving out to accomodate our sanity and either putting his degree (and, subsequently, babies) on hold a while longer or drawing it out over several more years.

Bleah. I'm trying to talk myself (and him) down. We can't do anything until after the wedding, anyway. Probably not until after the holidays, even. So maybe we'll get used to it. Maybe Cousin Useless won't come around quite so much once her kid is settled into his new school. Maybe once Matt's upstairs and we can just come home and shut ourselves up in our apartment and not have to negotiate a human obstacle course to get to each other we won't mind what goes on in the rest of the house. Maybe once our refrigerator is bought and installed and we have a proper kitchenette that we don't have to share with anybody we'll become a peaceful island unto ourselves, only venturing into the morass of people when it becomes necessary to leave the house.

Maybe.

In our saner moments, he thinks we should plan on sticking it out for a year, and then see where we're at and where we should go from there. I say six months. My six months might eventually be coaxed into a year, but for now, six months is the largest number I can deal with. With six months, the light is actually visible at the end of the tunnel. In six months we should know what kind of financial aide he's eligible for and whether or not I get to keep this job and what kind of raises I can expect to get and how often. And if we stick to my current payment plan, we should have quite a lot of debt paid down in six months.

Six months, and then we'll see what's what.

But if anybody else moves in, all bets are off.