Spatially Challenged Spouses

Murphy’s Law of Military Spouses says:  PCS Moves Must Coincide with a Deployment.

by Thomas Litchford

Over the years, I have learned something interesting about myself as a man: I am “spatially challenged.”  It’s OK; I’ve accepted it.  As a man, I’m not alone.  A lot of men are puzzled by interior design.  (What does “feng shui” mean, again?)  I read somewhere that, because of ancient hunter-gatherer societies in which women gathered foods like herbs, roots, and mushrooms, while men hunted game, women evolved to be more spatially sensitive than men.  This is why, when husbands ask their wives where the remote control is (or the peanut butter or the car keys), their wives know.

As military spouses, we understand the need to do things ourselves; fix the leaky sink, discipline the kids, move the family and all the family’s worldly possessions across seven states and the District of Columbia.  I learned the hard way that handling a move alone is not necessarily the best choice. 

House scouting.

I’d already made the trip to Newport twice in the search for our new house.  I waited until the last minute to find a house to rent the last time we’d moved, and I found one, but only by luck.  Determined not to make the same mistake, I came to Newport months ahead of our move to scout houses for rent.  I even brought back pictures for Danielle.  She and I drove to Newport together, in advance of her deployment, to look at them a month or so later.  We decided on a very unique, very old, very wonderful house.  The plaque on the front says it was built in 1839.  I would find out later that only a very small part of the house actually dates back to that year, but that’s a story for another time.

We walked through the house deciding where certain pieces of furniture would go, which bedroom would be the master, and so on.  The problem was that almost nothing we discussed doing would work.  All the first-floor rooms had seven-foot ceilings, except for the living room, which was an addition.  The stairway to the second floor was barely twenty-six inches wide.  Ditto for the stairway to the basement.  Which meant it was not wide enough for our dryer to fit through on its way to the laundry area.  The second floor has sloped ceilings.  All of these “features” made for interesting furniture arrangement puzzles.

Fast forward to move-in day.

So there I was in our new house, Danielle was deployed, with the movers streaming in one after another with boxes and pieces of furniture, and me saying, almost randomly, “Put that in the back room, put that here, put that there, that can go upstairs in the first bedroom.”  I wound up with such a jumble that I had to ask my sister and her husband to come down from Boston to help me make sense of things.  Even with their help, when Danielle arrived home, the dryer was in the kitchen and the “library” consisted of thirty-three boxes of books.  The bedroom we had chosen to be the master bedroom was too small to fit our chests of drawers and the queen-size bed (which barely fit up the stairs – thank goodness for the removable railing!) so I’d been sleeping in one room and dressing in the other.

I lived for weeks surrounded by a sea of cardboard.  So, why didn’t I unpack?  I knew better.

Flash back to bachelor days.

When Danielle and I were dating, I lived in an apartment by myself in St. Louis.  I painstakingly measured out the space and then hit the thrift stores.  As I shopped, I drew a layout to make sure everything would fit, and it did!  Basically, all the furniture went against the wall, leaving a nice open space in the middle.  Danielle walked in for the first time and was speechless.  We spent her weekend visit rearranging and shopping for more furniture.  It was a big enough pain in the butt doing that with a 700-square-foot apartment; I wasn’t going to go through it again with an 1,800-square-foot house.

Murphy’s Law of Military Spouses says:  PCS Moves Must Coincide with a Deployment.