I ask you… what kind of person wants to come and do house evaluation at eight o’clock in the morning? And indeed, what kind of person makes arrangements for someone to come and do a house evaluation at eight o’clock in the morning?
Our bank and my so-called husband is who.
Problem was that the morning in question I’d been woken early by the kids and the puppy and had found myself in a restless mood. It was the kind of mood that, in the past, would have inspired me to turn a bruise into the face of Jesus Christ with a magic marker .
So when the valuation guy turned up and turned out to be quite cute, I started flirting with him, even though I was wearing tracksuit pants and hadn’t brushed my hair, let alone looked in a mirror for about five days. It’s the school holidays, people. Get over it.
“I took a bullet for the team,” I informed my husband later. “My reckoning was that if I flirted enough, the valuer would realise that any house that had me in it would be worth substantially more.”
“I’m not sure $50 counts as being ‘substantially more’,” my husband replied, somewhat grumpily.
I knew I’d hit a sore point. He knows how hard I work at making everyone I meet like me and – ten years after the fact – still tells everyone about the time I temped in an office for three weeks and how they bought me a card and a cake on my birthday. Although, the last time he brought up this anecdote, I realised that due to the time of year I’d been in that office, it couldn’t possibly have been my birthday.
“It wasn’t a birthday cake, actually!” I told him. “It was only a card and cake because I was leaving…”
“… after only three weeks,” he replied dolefully. “Yeah, that makes me feel much better.”
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the evaluation came in on Friday and was $20,000 less than my husband had predicted.
“It must have been the tracksuit pants,” I said, somewhat disappointed in myself. “I should have frocked up… at eight o’clock in the frickin’ morning. Shit, you should have scheduled it for eight o’clock in the evening, and then I could have been wearing a cocktail dress, full make up and heels.”
“You don’t even wear full make up and heels for me!” he cried.
“Only because you seem to think I’m only worth $50!” I sulked.
Honestly, there’ll have to be more than $50 on the table for me to put on full make-up. I mean, the last time I let KT put mascara on me, it was a deeply confusing experience for me.
“Has it clumped?” I had asked, trying to sound like I understood the perils of mascara application.
“No,” she’d replied. “Why?”
“There’s this black thing I can see above my eye.”
“Uh, that’s your eyelashes, darling,” KT had gently told me.
Who wants to walk around any more aware of their eyelashes than they absolutely need to be? Shuh!
Of course, like many women who don’t wear makeup, I like to think it’s because I don’t need it. Yeah, right. Look, I’m only listening to what my husband once told me.
“You’re naturally beautiful,” he had said – not because it’s at all true but because it’s in his contract to do so. Of course he’d then added: “Imagine how beautiful you’d be if you wore makeup!”
He’s now no doubt imagining how much our house would be worth, too…
Not Drowning, Mothering. 