Column: Savagemama

George Bush Bought Me a Maytag

By Jennifer Savage, 4-11-08

These past two weeks Seth and his dad have been giving our little farmhouse a serious upgrade. Two rooms to which we’ve always kept the doors closed are becoming a part of our house with pocket doors, paint and electrical outlets that work. Our spare bedroom is turning into a kids’ room with cornflower blue walls, an insulated floor and heater. Our laundry room has a shiny tile floor to replace the painted concrete that’s been there for God only knows how long and a cold water line that does more than drip.

And tomorrow, America’s favorite home improvement box store will deliver our new washer and dryer.

I know those of you who’ve had the pleasure over the last six years to visit our laundry room/mud room/Imogene’s den of slack know I’m not bragging, I’m just excited. The room needed an overhaul and the appliances in it needed to be hauled away.

Besides, we are still just as poor as everyone else living in Missoula and would never have been able to afford this purchase had it not been for George Bush’s tanking economy and his feeble attempt to fix it with a stimulus package. Trust me, I’d love nothing more than to bury that blood money in the backyard and not lift a finger to help George out but, let’s face it, I have one baby and another on the way – a girl knows when she’s backed into a corner—so I let the little man in Washington buy me a Maytag.

The reason for the purchase: wringing wet clothes at the end of every wash cycle and two dryer cycles to get things mostly dry. Our old washer and dryer, which have found a new home at the Lake County dump, were nearly as old as me. Huge and hulking the washer sucked down enough water with every load to make even an East Coast water hog feel guilty. And the dryer had started to squeak as though it was headed slowly for its last spin cycle.

This set of stackable front loaders that will arrive at our door tomorrow may be the first appliances I’ve owned that haven’t already seen their useful life. These are the first ones that haven’t come off a job site where someone was upgrading to a better model and only happy to give us their castoffs. These aren’t hand-me-downs from one of our parents. They are a real, no-turning-back-now symbol that we are adults and that we will soon have two children.

Seth and I moved to Montana six years ago in a Toyota van with a futon, some clothes and a few boxes of books. We rented one half of a furnished vacation duplex on Rock Creek for six months and learned to fly fish. We didn’t know anyone in town so we spent that winter on the banks of Rock Creek practicing our casting. Seth tied flies at night. We read books out loud to each other, listened to good music and told each other our stories. We’d only been together a few months when we decided to move here but somehow it seemed like exactly the right thing to do and we spent that time at Rock Creek getting to know each other.

When spring came, we had to find a new place to live and began looking at rentals in town. Imogene proved to be an issue and we figured out pretty quickly that if we could buy a house our payments would be less than what people were asking for rent. So a few months later we found ourselves signing a stack of papers and at the end of it we owned a little yellow house on five acres in Arlee. The previous renters had taken their washing machine with them when they moved out but it wasn’t long before Seth came across one at a job he was working on. I remember catching my hand between it and our concrete steps as we worked to bring it into our laundry room.

Those days don’t seem sweeter to me as I think of them now but they do seem simpler. In the last six years we’ve shifted from Laundromat to Maytag, from vacation rental to house of our own, from Toyota van to Subaru. What gets me most is the shocking speed with which it all happened.

I was in another home improvement box store the other day looking for, of all things, a diaper pail big enough for the poopy diapers of two babies when I almost bumped into a woman on the other side of the aisle. She was on her cell phone talking about the Obama rally the day before. She was clearly excited, had gotten up early to volunteer for the candidate and talked on and on about his speech, his ideals. She wore black jeans, skinny at the bottom, a tight black shirt and a belt with silver studs. She was tall with blonde-tipped, short hair and spoke with the confidence that comes from being in her early twenties.

Although she probably had a better grip on fashion, I thought, I used to be her and not that long ago. I pictured her buying trash bags for her house, where she lived alone and drank wine late into the night listening to good music really loudly. I pictured her meeting friends for dinner, staying out too late and having tea dates late the next day. I pictured standing on her own two feet – in those skinny-legged jeans – trying to change the world and believing she could. I thought of my own daughter, squirming in the cart, trying to climb out and hoped she would one day do all of these things. And I realized, a few years ago I would have been attracted to this woman in the trash can aisle but that day I thought “that could be my daughter one day.”

My thinking has shifted so subtly, so silently that I don’t even realize it until moments like this. 

In the aisle of Lowe’s that day I was suddenly aware of what I looked like—pregnant out to there, trying to convince Eliza to stay in the cart for five more minutes. If the young woman on her cell phone noticed me at all she likely categorized me as “mom” and moved on. And it’s true. Everything about me that day screamed it – belly, baby in the cart. I am a mom.

A mom waiting on a Maytag.

And in those moments when I feel utterly uncool in my elastic-waisted pants, utterly not hip as I offer Eliza one more fruit leather I remind myself that this curly headed baby with sticky hands thinks I’m the world and being mom is just fine by me.

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep, Seth crawled into bed. I don’t know what time it was but he’d been up working on our house and like several nights before fell into bed exhausted. I opened the window and took off the long sleeve shirt I’d fallen asleep in because our room seemed stuffy. I lay there bare chest and exposed. He put a hand on my belly said, “you’re beautiful” then he kissed me on the arm and rolled over to go to sleep. Eliza was asleep across the room.

We’ve shifted, but we’ve all made the transition together.

And tomorrow when the Maytag arrives I, belly out to there, will happily point out to the delivery person the corner where it will live and no one will be happier about the shiny stackables than me. 

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