I’m the guilty party!

When I was talking to my friend Sarah the other day, I told her I was a marshmallow.  I didn’t mean that I was soft and spongy, (although I suppose that could be the case as well) I meant that sometimes I feel more guilt about things than I really probably should.

Hubby and I are talking about putting our house on the market again.  We tried to sell it for a few months last year, but then got scared by the economy and took it off.  That time we used  a friend of ours as our agent.  She told us that she would cut her side of the commission when we sold it because she would make it up when we bought a house.  She asked us how we wanted her to advertise and told us how much it was to put our house in several different advertisements.  Holy cow they were expensive!  Of course I didn’t want her to spend money on us that she might not recoup (I don’t think I was really convinced that it was going to sell) so there wasn’t a whole lot that was done to market our house. 

Now that we are thinking about trying again I’m not sure that I want to use her as our agent.  I think we might want a new perspective on it.  But of course, I would feel horribly guilty if we didn’t go with her again.  She took us around to look at several houses when ours was on the market, and I would like her to make some money, at some point for all the time she spent on us.  That, and I really don’t want to pay the full 6% commission if we listed it with someone else!  The really silly thing about this whole situation is, if I could just get over this I probably would have bit the bullet, and our house would be for sale right now.  Instead I’m anguishing over whether our not we would burn that bridge with our friend if we went with someone else and what we should do about it.

Hubby has also been talking about going on another vacation, just the two of us.  His uncle (whom he works for) told him a couple of years ago that the points are piling up on the credit card that they use for the business and we should just take a trip once a year or so and use the points for our airfare.  The last trip we took was in 2008 when we went to NYC.  Hubby is throwing around crazy things like going to Hawaii.  I have two problems with that.  The first one being, a flight from here to Hawaii is like 7 hours.  I think I might possibly die if I were on a cramped plane for 7 hours.  The longest flight I have been on was 4, and that was akin to torture.  I just get really bored!  The second problem is that we would need to farm out our kids.

Here’s my take on babysitting.  I don’t like to ask people to do something that I wouldn’t want to do myself, and I HATE babysitting!  The only people that I feel somewhat comfortable asking are my parents.  But I have guilt associated even with that because I know that as much as my parents love my children and are willing, even anxious to keep them for several hours, they want them for several hours, not several days.  They are in the grandparent stage of life and don’t want to go back to the parent stage of life even for a week.  They’ve been there, done that.  The other problem I have is self inflicted guilt because I know my mother.  She hasn’t ever gotten to take fun trips like the ones that we have gone on, so I know that she would much rather come with us than stay home taking care of our kids.

I think it all comes down to in my mind, that I am their mother, they are my responsibility, and if we go on a vacation, I am shirking my God-given responsibility.  And of course, I feel guilty!