Reflections on Building My Life With My Wife and Kids

Thanks for your support: 30% off 💙 40% off 💙 50% off 💙 60% offWe lived in a cozy, white, barn-style house about a mile from the river. The house was so old they didn’t even know when it was built. Their best estimate was sometime before 1900 when everyone wasn’t so serious about keeping records and marking every little thing down.I think the best way for me to do to give you a sense of our house would be to ask my daughters to paint it.When children paint things, they can’t help but include their feelings in the picture. In that way, a painting is a much more accurate representation than a photograph.If the house is a happy place, children will find a way to turn the front wall into a face. The windows will become eyes complete with eye shines, and hopefully there will be something that ends up suggesting a smile.I hope that when my daughters paint our house, the image is happy and full of adventure and love and comfort and warmth. I think that will be the case, but these are the types of things you can never take for granted. You always have to be on guard, because when you become complacent a little bit of sadness can creep in. Then again, a little bit of sadness isn’t all that bad. Sometimes you have to stop and sit with your sadness for a while.So as I write this, I guess I’ve come to recognize that a sad looking painting of a house wouldn’t be the end of the world. If my children came to me with such a thing, I could use it as a map to guide them out of some sort of quandary that might have otherwise remained invisible.This is why you should regularly do art with your kids.Do art with them, and don’t just look at it and say, “Oh, that’s nice,” although you should say that.Really look at it.Examine the lines.Try to imagine the movement of their little hands across the page. That’s not easy because a painting is a compilation of many movements. Sometimes your kids, just like all people, hid the truth or they hide their pain and then they cover it up. But one of the tricks about people is that they always leave just enough evidence for a caring person to see. They do it this way to ask for help even as they protect themselves. And if you’re a caring person, you will see the clues and unlock whatever tangle is causing them discomfort.If you’re not a caring person, take heart, because that’s something you can choose. You can become better at it. It’s been a long process for me, and still I’d like to be better.Prior to moving into our house, my wife and I traveled around the area staying with my friends. We were nomads. I’d met my brave wife in Peru. Years later, when we watched ‘Paddington,’ we learned the bear had come from there as well, and my children’s eyes lit up.I’d lived in Peru for almost 10 years. My wife and I met when we were both working as teachers at a school. Taking that job had been something out of the norm for me. I generally didn’t seek the kind of shirt and tie employment I found there. But it gave me an air of respectability, and that was fortunate because that forged my wife’s first impression of me.We came to the United States in November when the leaves were in full bloom and it was still warm enough to walk around outside without a jacket. My poor, brave wife didn’t know what she was in for when the winter came. The thing that was hardest for her in the first year was the lowness of the sun in the sky.In Peru, throughout the year, the sun is always directly overhead.When you’re used to seeing the sun in a certain place, it’s disconcerting to find it elsewhere.We are on a planet after all, but you can go your whole life without fully recognizing or understanding that fact.Looking out upon a horizon with the sun low and dark at midday makes you feel as if you were on the surface of Mars. This does not feel like home. Home is far, far, away.I could have been a better aid to my wife in those times. But coming back to Wisconsin felt like home to me. I wanted to share with her the beauty of the cold and the crystalline snowflakes and the cozy darkness.There are nice things in hard moments, but appreciation can be a long road.We spent our first month as nomads, traveling here and there, purchasing groceries so as not to wear out our welcome. Then we found a house with a tenant on the first floor, and purchased it with a rebate program offered by the government. The tenant paid $450, and the mortgage was $575. So, we only had to make $125 a month for rent.The house we occupy today bears little resemblance to the house when we were given the keys on December 9th.First of all, there was a large tree out by the road on the other side of the sidewalk. The city came and took it down, but you can still see it in some online photos.One fall, after the leaves fell, a bee’s nest was exposed up in the branches. I decided to take it down with a football. I still remember my wife standing by the door, my two little girls about as high as her knee. They were all smiling with anticipation.“Don’t do it daddy! It’s a bad idea, the bees will get angry.”“The bees have gone darlings, everything will be fine.”“Why can’t you just leave it?”“I’m afraid they’ll come back. I don’t want you to get stung.”We had various issues with bees. I’ll get to those later on.The nest was just paper, and back then I could still throw a ball hard and with accuracy. It only took about two or three throws to bring the nest down. The first time I hit it, nothing happened, and the kids came out. Then when the nest finally fell, we cut it open to look at all the intricate chambers inside.The girls still laughed at me, and retreated into the house shaking their heads and muttering about how much work it would be to keep daddy in line.That’s going to be a reoccurring theme too. Daddies should have a little mischief to them. You have to be careful. It can’t be too much, just as too much salt can spoil the steak. But just the right amount ads a little sizzle to your life. It’s that electric surge of excitement. It’s that twinkle in your eye.Those are the eye shines.That’s the light of life.On the day my wife and I took possession of our house, we drove back to my mom’s place. We’d signed the papers and it was late and we hadn’t had time to move our mattress and our other meager possessions.It was snowing heavily as we made the one hour drive. I came over a hill and saw a deer standing in the middle of the road. I hit the brakes, but the deer struck my hood and flipped over the top of the car. I didn’t know it then, but my wife was already pregnant at that moment.It’s not a good thing to have an accident during a snowstorm in Wisconsin, but I knew that there was a rest area not too far away. The headlight had been knocked loose by the impact, but we made it up the road. I popped the hood and found that the radiator was still intact. I took some zip ties from my glove compartment and put the headlight back in place.Fortunately, we were still good to drive.That was my 1999 green Subaru Sport with the standard transmission.It would be our daily driver for the next five years, dent and all.We navigated the road through the dark woods with the headlights illuminating the gently drifting snow. I struck one other deer when I was in high school. Then there was a time when a deer crashed into my car as I sat parked. It’s not a frequent event, but I wonder what my wife thought since her first encounter with a deer happened within her first month in the state.“It was us or him,” she said. The danger of hitting deer is when people swerve, lose control, and crash. You can hit the brakes, but you shouldn’t swerve. You also have to be mindful of cars coming up behind you, but the highway had been empty and we didn’t have that to fear.A day later we returned to our new home. It had been a discount house and just about everything was falling apart. If you placed a marble on the floor, it rolled to the corner of the room. The walls were awful, the bathroom was horrid, there was a lot of work to do.We went to the hardware store and purchased four vibrant paints. When the choice came down to two colors, we picked based on the names.I can’t remember precisely what the colors were called, but my memory is close enough. I think the orange that we selected for the kitchen was called illumination. The green in our bedroom was emerald forest. The lime in the hallway was either pixie dust or fairy, or sprite. It was about the same color as Tinkerbell, and perhaps that’s part of the reason why we had so many fairies in our house. The living room was ocean blue.The first thing my wife and I did was paint. We taped the trim on the floors and put down plastic to protect the carpet. We opened the windows and cleaned the rooms and sinks. The paint adds a smell of newness to the house. Then I rented a machine and washed all the rugs and by the time we were done, the place felt a little more like our home.But it wasn’t our home yet. It was a foreign space filled with the energy of all the people who had come before. Again, this house was a hundred years old, and there were spirits in the walls. My wife talked to me about them when I went away. She had to have a stern conversation with one, and it stopped pestering her.This house has been here over a hundred years. The bones are strong, built from two by fours that more resemble three by fives. I’d come to find that out because before I was done I removed quite a few of the walls.But I didn’t know how to do any of that in my first days. I didn’t know how to be a good daddy or a good husband because I was new to the latter and had not yet become the former. Or at least, I didn’t know it yet.My brave wife put all her faith in me. We’d come to Wisconsin on the cusp of winter to begin our life together. Obama had recently been elected and for a brief time the United States felt like a fashionable place to reside.I’ve always had a fondness for the cold. I like skiing and building snowmen and sledding and making forts. I am dazzled by the warmth of spring. I relish the embrace of a river. The autumn days with the falling leaves remind you of your mortality and the beauty of existence.All that was a lot to absorb. There were foreign smells and no place to sleep and an ancient home that had perhaps seen a lot of turmoil sheltering us from the cold. I resolved to allow this poor old house to find a happy family inside. I think the wood soaks in the love, and it becomes stronger over time.I remember sitting in our empty living room. I’d set up the television I had in college. It was a 27 inch tube screen. I connected it to my DVD player and we watched “Cool Hand Luke.” It’s dark in Wisconsin in the winter, but that means you can cuddle up with the person you love beneath a blanket and send your mind elsewhere on the wings of a shared dream.Decades later, I’d read stories to my children in the adjoining room, and those stories as much as anything would become our shared, lived memories.The first days were spent on an air mattress beneath a sleeping bag.My wife recalled that she didn’t like the silence. She’d been raised in a city with constant noise. Here there was nothing, and the darkness outside seemed absolute. It was as if we were on a spacecraft far from anything she’d ever known.But we were together, and one thing we had in common was that there was plenty we wanted to get away from. As for me, I just wanted 10 years of peace to try things my way, not the way I’d been lectured and pressured to be. Writing this, I’ve had 16. We’ve been guided by compassion and cooperation, and it’s been everything I ever hoped a life could be.Thanks for your support: 30% off 💙 40% off 💙 50% off 💙 60% offI'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe