Brownies Saved Me From Buyers Remorse

It is a truth universally acknowledged that moving sucks. Moving especially sucks when it rains for nearly two weeks straight, you have endless piles of stuff belonging to your four kids and your new home does not fit all your old junk. Moving from a rental to a home you now own is even more excruciating. You’re moving at warp speed to get your real house in order and then you realize that you have to scrub down your rental top to bottom and acknowledge that at heart, your kids are a bunch of slobs.

OK, so I may sound bitter but I’m not. Though my skin is raw from using too much cleaning product with bleach and I’ve probably inhaled enough toxic fumes to have wiped out all of the hair in my nasal passages, I’m really not. Truth be told I would have been 300% more bitter if not for the plate of brownies that arrived at my door two days ago.

When I moved from California to NJ, I went through a period of stiff upper lip catatonic cheerfulness as I soon realized that life on the east coast was no picnic when you have four kids under the age of 8. The weather stinks, mosquitoes the size of pigeons bite my children so much I actually worry about West Nile Virus and to make things completely absurd, the price of everything seems twice as much for living in a state with high property taxes, toll booths on their highways and really appalling fruits and vegetables. Suffice it to say that buying a house was not the celebratory experience that one would assume. In fact, it made me so anxious that I was gulping Mylanta like the Starbucks lattes that I used to be able to get when there was actually a Starbucks I could get to without driving 5 miles (another reason to hate NJ…cue the violins!).

So, when the deal finally closed, my anxiety did not end. I started having panic attacks a few times a day thinking that I had made a huge mistake. It was like buyers remorse but on the biggest ticket item you can think of. Of course you can return the 20th pair of cute black heels that you just had to have but a house, not so much. I was coming back from my 10th trip to the rental to pick up more junk when one of our new neighbors from across the street brought over a plate full of brownies.

Seriously, when was the last time you received moist and chewy goodies from a perfect stranger with seemingly no ulterior motive? It is perhaps the most neighborly thing to have happened to me in my life and my children were witness to the delivery which made the gesture even more special. So, yes, I’m still in NJ but a plate of brownies saved me from major buyers remorse and I’ve stopped gulping Mylanta. That’s definitely something to be cheerful about.