When I completed high school I did the next logical thing: I went to college. Not necessarily because I wanted to, but because it was expected and I didn’t have a good reason not to. What else was I going to do? I did not grow up saying, “When I’m older I want to be a (fill in the blank).” I literally had no aspiration to be a specific thing.
Except a mom. I wanted to be a mom with children and stay home and mom them at home. I never envisioned myself having a career or climbing any corporate ladder. I just wanted babies and lots of them.
So after I graduated from college with a degree in Management Studies (with a concentration in Quantitatives and Systems Analysis, whatever that is lol) I got married and dove in. I was pregnant just a few months after the first wedding and had morning sickness at the second (a story for another day).
Ben and I took seriously the command to “be fruitful and multiply,” producing five children in eight years. I might have continued, but they kept getting bigger, and when the last one came out at almost ten pounds, I decided I was done.
The toddler years were exhausting but so much fun, and I never regretted my decision to have a houseful so quickly. They all had built-in playmates and life was grand, albeit poor as an enlisted Navy family. I got used to being asked “are they all yours?” and “do you know what causes that?” Yes, and yes.
The children grew and we started hearing predictions of doom about the coming teen years. “Just you wait,” they said. “Mothers and their teenage daughters yada yada yada,” they said. We ignored it all and had a blast having all those teens at one time. It was more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
Then the children started driving and life became somewhat dicey. At one point we owned four cars, a 12-passenger van, and a truck, and we had to look at the next day’s schedule to figure out what order to stack the cars in the driveway. Who needed to leave first, etc.?
Then suddenly college hit.
Did you know that when you have five children in eight years, at some point you will have at least three in college at one time? And it will invariably be the same time your husband is working toward his master’s degree.
Four people in college. One at the community college, two at university, and one in a master’s program. It’s hard to believe we didn’t starve to death or lose the house. But God miraculously provided in ways we couldn’t have foreseen—and probably wouldn’t have chosen. It never worked on paper, but somehow we lived to tell about it.
A few days ago, friend who has a few children approaching college age asked me how we made it. How did we afford college for all of them? I could see the beginnings of panic in her eyes as she was trying to figure it all out, and I remember feeling just like that.
I told her it wasn’t just one thing. It was help from many directions plus some good old-fashioned work and a little divine intervention in the checkbook.
We had help. My parents gave us considerable aid with the total bills, and we are forever grateful. The children all worked every summer, and all their money went into the tuition fund. I filled out the FAFSA (is that still a thing?) every year for each child. We applied for all the scholarships we could find. We left no financial-aid stone unturned. We did not drive fancy cars or have fancy clothes or go on expensive vacations (or any vacations for that matter, except the year Aunt Arline gave us her timeshare at Disney). Ben took odd jobs painting a house here, a few rooms there, renovating a bathroom (also a story for another day).
Then there was The Cat House.
Ben was working in defense contracting in Arlington, Virginia, commuting an hour each way. One day a coworker came to him and said, “So I hear you do some house remodeling.” Ben admitted that yes, he had done a few things.
Alex (not his real name) proceeded to tell Ben that he and his wife owned a townhouse in Manassas they needed “some work” done on so they could sell it and move to Florida. He described it briefly, then said, “We do cat rescue.”
“Okay,” Ben thought. “They have a few cats. Whatever.”
One day after work Ben went with Alex to look at the house so he could put together an estimate. I have yet to hear what Ben was thinking when he agreed to the job, but he decided it would be a family project and we would make enough to pay a year’s tuition for two of the children. It sounded like a great opportunity.
Alex and his wife and cats moved out of the house, and Ben went straight to work. The first day he said he was going by himself with the truck and trailer to pull all the carpet and take it to the dump. I wasn’t sure why he also took an N95 mask and gloves that came up to the elbow plus muck boots, but I figured he knew what he was doing.
We all went for the second trip, which I was told would include tearing out all the kitchen cabinetry and starting on the bathrooms.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I walked into and I immediately understood the N95.
“Cat rescue” might have been a stretch. Apparently Alex and his wife housed 27 cats in this 1100-square-foot townhouse (I am not making this up or exaggerating), and the neighbors on both sides could smell them all through the walls that separated the units. Even with the carpet gone, my eyes watered and I had to go outside when I got lightheaded. There had been no litter boxes, only big piles of litter in the corners of two bedrooms. When Ben was dragging the carpet down the stairs and outside, it left a wet trail. We had to cut out the sheetrock halfway up the walls and replace it along with some of the subfloor.
I stood in the bathroom in disbelief. I would need a literal chisel to chip the half-inch coat of hardened black grime off the perimeter of the tub and faucet (still not exaggerating). This was far beyond a bucket and scrub brush. We took the toilets outside and tried to pressure wash them, but it was hopeless. They would have to be replaced.
We chipped. We scraped. We scoured. Words cannot describe the extent of the damage. Then Ben went through and sprayed everything—subflooring, walls, ceilings—with oil-based Kilz to seal off the smell.
We rebuilt the place almost from the studs out—new cabinetry, new bathroom fixtures, new lighting, new electrical outlets and switches. Everything left was doused in commercial-grade disinfectant. We worked for weeks.
Finally we were nearing the homestretch. The new flooring was installed. Ceilings, walls, and trim were painted. We could actually breathe inside and we could see the end in sight.
One day Ben and the realtor in charge of selling the place were standing in the kitchen marveling at the transformation, and Ben said, “I just feel like I can still faintly smell the cat urine, but I can’t imagine where it’s coming from.”
Then he looked up at the ceiling above him and noticed a slight shadow. He got on a ladder and gave it a gentle push. Hmm, a little bit of give. He had a keyhole saw in his hand, so he shoved it into the ceiling sheetrock and what came out was not dust, but mud. Urine-soaked sheetrock—in the ceiling.
Turns out there was a heat-and-air vent in the upstairs bedroom the cats had been peeing in, and so much had accumulated in the ductwork, it had created a slowly leaking pool that dripped onto the kitchen ceiling. (I wish I were making this up.)
So while Mike and I bleached the siding outside, Ben cut out the wet sheetrock and replaced it along with a section of ductwork, mudding the seams and re-priming and painting the kitchen ceiling.
Once we were finished, you never would have known a single cat had lived in the place. The neighbors thanked us profusely, and the house sold pretty quickly. We paid the year’s college bills and lived happily ever after with a great horrifying story to tell.
I do not necessarily recommend this method of putting children through college—the experience left us all somewhat scarred.
But as they say, desperate times call for desperate measures. The Cat House was ours.
Wow. Just wow.