Does it ever get better. Ugh. I'm so tired of crying.

*sigh* Just houses. It's not working. We may have to stay with renting.

One good thing. With the money we've been saving up for house closing costs, we could pay off Stephen's car and have an extra $125 a month, which could go to rent at a different place. Or pay for a storage unit here.

He also did something with his student loan to lower it, like we did with my loan when we were first married. So that gives us an extra $70/month for at least a couple years. That's enough to cover diapers.

The extra $200 for health care for adding a baby to the family is pre-tax money, which means we only lose roughly $150/month instead of the full $200. Some way or another, according to Stephen's math, we'll have about $11 left over at the end of the month if we rent a $900/month place.

The worst part about this is that we've told so many people that we're looking for a house to buy. People get excited for you when you say you're going to buy a house. And now we're going to have to deal with not only our own disappointment, but also all the other people's slight disappointment that we can't buy a house.

Most people wouldn't care about watching other people be disappointed for you. But I'm not most people. Seeing the disappointment in their eyes is just way too much of a reminder of my own profound disappointment.

We have tried so. Hard.

A while ago, Stephen was confessing how he has an "elder brother" (from the parable of the prodigal son) mentality about this whole house hunt thing. "I worked hard my whole life to be able to get a house. I deserve this! And it's still out of my reach! It's not fair," he admits. (And yes, he has begun to address this attitude in himself now.) When he first started talking about this attitude he knows he has, I kind of gave him a one-eyebrow-raised look, like, "Really? You think you deserve it just because you worked hard? Life doesn't work that way. Life isn't fair." Because that's how my mom thinks: working hard doesn't get you ahead. It's mostly luck, with a little bit of hard work thrown in there.

But Sunday I had a complete meltdown outside a restaurant. "Epic" is the word Stephen used to describe it. And I've been thinking about it ever since, because I didn't have a reason for it. Today I realized that the reason is because he does deserve the stupid house. He deserves it because he loves me to the moon and back and is completely, wholly Christlike in every way to me. He deserves the stupid house and he deserves everything in the world he wants. He deserves a wife who cooks him meals three times a day, keeps the house spotless, raises perfect kids, and all out of pure love for him. He deserves every domestic comfort in the world because he is the most patient, best, most loving man in the world. And all he's asking for is a nice home to raise a kid in and he can't get it.

So yeah, I'm upset. Yeah, I'm crying. Yeah, I'm being totally irrational and forgetting everything I have learned about loving God in the last 5 years. He deserves better than this and I can't understand why it's so hard.

He actually deserves a better wife. That wife I described, that isn't me. I'm not going to raise perfect kids, I'm NEVER going to have a spotless house, and I'm struggling just to cook dinner every night lately.

I wouldn't leave, of course, because if he can't have the perfect wife he deserves, he sure as heck isn't going to have to deal with the wife he does have leaving him. Over my dead body.

But anyway, my shortcomings and imperfections just seem especially brutally glaringly unhelpful lately in light of the house stress and I just hate the living daylights out of it all and so I've been crying and being dramatic a lot.

He doesn't deserve a dramatic wife, either, but Lordy. I just cannot deal lately. All my dramatic emotional stops are coming out and I'm regressing back to the gal I was as a teenager.

Thankfully, that's the least of his worries. If there's one thing he is totally capable of handling, it's a crying woman. It's kind of amazing and wonderful, actually, and makes me laugh out loud because that's SO different than most guys and yet it is so completely true. :) But I totally completely love that about him, and I know that's God introduced us.

Um, so anyway, I've been rambling enough. Thank goodness I have tomorrow off. I seriously need a day off. Actually, I need a week off. But alas. The world keeps turning. Although my boss would be totally understanding. He's great.

Anyway. Off to bed, I suppose. Or at least to go hug Stephen for a while.

-Stephanie

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