I live in a tiny house. No - not a “Tiny House” - not one of those ultra-cool, trending, “my bed unfolds on top of the refrigerator and becomes a bathtub during the day” houses…just a very small - “tiny” - house. My two very tall adult-sized children inhabit the two bedrooms on the second floor. My boyfriend and I inhabit the dining room. We prefer to call it our bedroom, but - let’s be honest - there isn’t enough room for a dresser, only one of us gets a nightstand (me, of course…I have more “stuff”…) and the closet is only three feet wide. Also, there’s an electrical outlet two feet down from the ceiling, perfect for an ornamental wall clock, and - the kicker - a chair rail runs the the full perimeter. It’s a dining room.
The stairs to the second floor are right outside our room, and run parallel to my boyfriend’s side of the bed. My son is 6’5”, and cannot tiptoe or whisper. We always know when he is home, and we always wake up when he tries to get a late night snack (we sleep in the dining room, after all…). My daughter’s room is right above ours, and she loves to paint and do crafts at her desk. We hear her rolling office chair above our heads, and know when she is still up at 1 a.m.
A few days ago, my boyfriend accused me of being a negative person. I got very negative about it. He further explained that my first instinct is to complain, and - upon my challenge to do so - he began to list very concrete examples of this from the past few days. Okay…but it HAS been really hot…and it is annoying when I can’t find my phone charger… and why ARE your boots always so dirty when you get home form work? Dammit.
So, I’m a negative person. Now don’t worry - I am not taking his word for it and fully accepting this simplistic perspective. I know that I am not defined by negativity. And I know that, most of the time, I operate out of of sense of hope and optimism and perseverance, and an ability to learn from my mistakes and forgive myself and others, and try try again. Also, I know that my boyfriend doesn’t think of me as a “Negative Person By Nature” - because, if he did, he would not bring it to my attention as something new and - potentially - toxic. Oh - and I guess he might not be my boyfriend. But…but…I DO usually complain FIRST. Complaining is my FIRST instinct, before I take a breath, pull up my socks, and dig in to whatever new challenge I am facing.
I’ve been complaining a lot this summer about our tiny house. Because - well -because I have adult-sized teenager children, and an actual adult boyfriend, along with two dogs and two cats, and we have been living almost on top of each other for six months now. Due to the pandemic, my kids haven’t been going to school, playing sports, or going to work. And neither have I. My boyfriend works early every morning, and needs to go to bed early…which is hard to do when giant humans are stomping up and down the steps, closing doors, doing crafts, watching tv, talking, and basically being alive right outside his door. I find myself yelling at my kids to be quiet at 9 pm every night - which is like mid-afternoon for them (the pandemic has totally destroyed any chance of a normal nocturnal schedule for teenagers). I am torn between letting my kids have a summer with friends and late night swims and later curfews, and my boyfriend actually getting more than four hours of sleep before having to operate a 30-tonne cement truck all day. I dream about an end to this stress, and this dream consists of moving to a large back-split home, with a big family room and an actual eat-in kitchen (no more breakfast bar) on the shared level, and then a level at the back for each person in our household to call their own, so we can all retreat to our own floor after dinner, and - well - ignore each other.
Since my boyfriend’s comment, and my subsequent brooding/processing, I have challenged myself to complain less. I will try to see the bright side FIRST more often. I will try to skip the negative step that is so deeply embedded between the “learn new information” and the “get on with it” steps of my every day living process. Of course, as soon as I issued this personal challenge, I was personally challenged.
My son had a new friend over the other night. I knew he was coming, but I had never met him before. He came in the back door, and went right up to my son’s bedroom without introducing himself to me as I sat in the kitchen. Because the kitchen is about 20 feet away from the back door, and going up the stairs silently is impossible if you don’t know how to tiptoe, I heard him arrive. So, I went to the bottom of the stairs, looked up, saw both my son and the new boy outside my son’s bedroom door, and noticed that the new boy was wearing a backpack. Funny, don’t you think? I remember wearing a backpack to my friends'‘s house when I was a teenager. I remember puking up Wildberry Wine Coolers later that same night. That’s as much as I am going to say here, because I actually don’t know what was in that backpack, but I did make it known that I found it odd that the boy did not get introduced, and that the boy was wearing a backpack just to “hang-out”. And I did make a point of putting towels and sheets away upstairs several times that evening, and I did make sure I stayed in the kitchen until that boy left. Those boys knew that I knew whatever it was that I was supposed to know. They knew I was on to them. That would not have been the case in a larger house, where they could escape down the back staircase or party in the guest house.
My daughter is stressed about going back to school. I didn’t know this until a few days ago. She spends a lot of time in her room, and I have become very lax in my parenting of her. I used to make a point of getting her outside with me to exercise at least once a day, and I would go up and lie on her bed every night for a chat before bed. When she started high-school last fall, she joined the rugby and the volleyball teams, and I stopped feeling like I had to make sure she was being active at home. When the pandemic struck, her sports stopped - but I didn’t re-instate any kind of daily physical activity requirement for her, because I felt - as I think we all felt - that the pandemic would be over soon. Six months later, and she still doesn’t exercise or even get outside very often. And, while I know how I feel after I spend too much time on my phone (I have to fight the urge to go back to bed EVERY morning if I spend more than 30 minutes on social media), I somehow assumed that she was fine. She grew up with it, after all. And she’s not reading depressing Twitter stories…. (I know, I know…she’s watching toxic Tik Tok videos instead…) I secretly enjoyed the quiet house and my alone time when the kids were each in their own rooms for most of the day. We were all home together full-time, and we SAW each other every time someone needed to eat, so I stopped being intentional about chatting every night. SEEING her at meal times time took the place of actually TALKING to her. It happened gradually, and I never would have noticed the slide if her room wasn’t right above mine - if she didn’t t live practically on top of me. If she had her own wing somewhere in a mansion, I would assume - incorrectly - that she was busy doing things OTHER than lying on her bed with her phone. But, after a week of hearing no chair-wheel noises from above, I realized that she had stopped painting and creating, and was now spending pretty much every waking moment on her phone or watching tv.
And then, the other night, she asked if I would buy her a “dab pen”. I didn’t know what that was, either. It’s a marijuana pen, specifically designed to help calm anxiety and help with sleep. It’s not legal for a teenager, but - according to her - some parents buy them for their kids who suffer with insomnia due to anxiety. Hello, red flag!!
I managed to swallow the “What the actual fuck?” and the “You are only FOURTEEN”!!” screaming banshee voices in my head…but just barely. Instead, by some miraculous channeling of a much calmer and insightful version of myself, I asked her why she was feeling anxious.
Well, guess what? I have been complaining - pretty vocally, as it turns out - about the back-to-school plan. I am a teacher, after all, so these large class sizes and all-day-in-the-same-room-for-one-subject routines will personally affect me. I kinda forgot - and I kinda feel like a complete and absolute idiot for forgetting - that my daughter is actually going to be a player in this dystopian experiment; on the ground floor, in fact. My son has opted for online learning because there is no way that he can sit in one room for six hours (he has never even been a gamer - he CANNOT sit this long), but my daughter wants to go back so she can see “at least some of her friends”.
Turns out that it’s difficult to convince a kid that there are some positives in the new school routine when you’ve been calling it a “gong-show” for two weeks, and predicting that we will likely have a second wave and be shut down again before Halloween. I mean, I WILL pull up my socks, dig in, and make things great for my students…AFTER I complain loudly about it for a while. My daughter has only heard my complaints (maybe because that is all I’ve voiced), and she is stressed about not seeing her friends, about having a subject she hates for 5 hours a day, about not having her sports, about not being able to go out for lunch, and she is very - VERY - disappointed that she will not have a locker (lockers are very important for a students’ sense of home and safety at school…), and - oh ya - she’s worried about becoming deathly ill.
I am going to take a huge leap here and assume that my complaining instinct is a bit annoying to my boyfriend. It likely also compromises my own desire to live a joyful life full of gratitude. And now I have learned that my complaining has also been feeding my daughter’s anxiety. I was making her anxiety worse by giving her more to worry about. I am now trying to undo the damage by reminding her of the obstacles she has already conquered in her life, and explaining that she can conquer this obstacle, too - and that I will help. As I tried to think of some good things about the new routine, I realized that having one subject a day may actually HONESTLY be good for my daughter. She struggles with organization, and often forgets her homework from Period 1 by the end of Period 4. Now, she will only have to remember one homework assignment per night, and she will likely have less homework, because what teacher can fill 5 hours of class time WITHOUT providing some independent work time? Not me. Why didn’t I open with that? That is actually brilliant! Also, while the social interaction between classes and at lunch time is often fun, it can also be stressful as teenagers encounter judgments, bullying, and peer pressure. Now, my daughter can go to class, relax without having to “be on display” for the day, and then come back home (or, hopefully, play some sort of a sport after school before coming home…fingers crossed!) This decreased “display/judgement” time might also actually have some benefits to her learning. Who knows?
I feel both embarrassed and lucky: embarrassed that I assumed she was okay for so long, and that I assumed I could vent my worries without affecting her; lucky for catching this - catching her - before things got worse.
I have my tiny house to thank for my ability to get my nose into my kids’ business. If we didn’t live so close together, I would not have an excuse for being outside their bedroom doors so often. I would not hear and see the the potential red flags. In a larger house, things would be more quiet and less stressful in the short-term, but likely more dangerous and much more stressful in the long term. I am thankful for my tiny house. I think we’ll be living here for a few more years…
