Grateful Home

giving thanks to the house that was once our home.

It’s been a week of many tears. Our old house has been sold and although the kids and I moved out in October 2023 - after an enormous leakage that brought the living room ceiling crashing down - we still had most of our stuff there.

Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that we left the house about a year and a half ago taking only what we were wearing and what we could carry. We moved into my sister’s fully furnished apartment a few blocks down that she and her family only use in the summer months as they live abroad. We went from natural disaster to peace of mind in just a three minute drive. But it took me a lot longer to slowly let go of all the stress that had been building up throughout the years.

You wouldn’t say it if you see the photograph of our ‘old’ house, but like any old property there was always something broken, leaking or damaged. We spent twenty years fixing, coping and adapting to whatever upkeep catastrophe occurred.

At first - when my husband and I divorced - I felt lost and alone in the house always worried about how to deal with the difficult moments on my own. Then - as if out of the blue - I turned into a fearless Miss Fix-It-All. Nothing was too much trouble and I have to say I learnt a hell of a lot about swimming pool pumps, electrics, DIY and plumbing. I was proud of always getting through another (big or little) disaster.

In the beginning a lot of the work was on me, but as the kids grew up we shared the load and spent many weekends working in the garden, cleaning the pool or fixing up and painting rooms. We were always struggling with something or other and it was only after I turned about forty eight that I realized that all this hard work and effort had taken a toll on me. My body ached, my heart sunk every time something else broke and my spirit was no longer making jumps of joy to solve these ever increasing challenges.

Many tears of utter desperation were shed as I tried to survive it all. I think that the house secretly absorbed all my sadness. Until it couldn’t anymore. Until the ceiling came crashing down soaked in liters of water, collected over many, many years. It was literally the last drop. We had all had enough. Even the house. So we fled.

Never realizing we’d never return to live in our cosy home full of memories again.

My ex husband had the house repaired (it being his property and all). The fresh new coats of paint applied by professional painters throughout the house covered years of amateur paint strokes brushed on by our well intended blood, sweat and tears. The thatch roof was redone. It went from a dark mossy green to a wonderful shade of golden glow. The garden was once again landscaped by proper gardeners and our son brought the swimming pool back to life. (Like in the old days when all our friend’s kids would come around for a swim after school or in the summer months.) The house was injected with a majestic dose of greatly overdue maintenance. The type I couldn’t afford to give it in all of my previous years there but so desperately tried to overcompensate by making all our wonderful (DIY) memories count as fixer-up-patches of love.

I was happy to see the house shine again. But a certain sadness came over me too, wondering why in the twenty years we had lived there this kind of trouble had never been made or offered before. I felt we might have been unworthy of it. Even worse… my heart ached for our kids as they were now old enough to see all the measures of extra care that were going into the house not for them to enjoy, but to be put on the market to sell.

In the end the house looked the part, sold quickly to a new family hoping to start a new life there, and we were left without a place to call home even though our divorce agreement promised otherwise.

I try not to fixate on what isn’t and focus on what is in life. And so I am forever grateful to my sister and her husband for lending us their home away from home to live in whilst I recover from my complex trauma burn-out and find the courage to start all over again in life.

We take with us fond memories of our home, where the kids and I grew up in together, where we held each other tightly through the rough parts and shared all our secrets and fears only for the walls to hear. The home with the huge garden for all the dogs and pets we owned to roam free in, where the owl sung us to sleep at night and the buzzards greeted us by flying over when we drove up the driveway. The home that catered for every sort of party big and small, with always enough space for more. The home where laughter filled the rooms and movie nights were often a good excuse to cuddle up together in our excessively large living room with bowls of crisps and chocolates. The home that housed us all during the pandemic, kept us safe and showed us how bloody lucky we were to have each other.

These and so, so many other memories will lovingly stick with us and thankfully will never fade.

But this week has been about properly moving out all our ‘stuff’. Furniture, books, toys, kitchenware, anything and everything. We’re on a sudden and tight deadline, so there’s no time to waste. I’ve rented some storage space, a truck to move the larger pieces of furniture and a skip to throw away anything and everything that’s of no use anymore. We’ve gifted quite a few items as well in the knowledge that you get what you give in life.

Sadness took over for a few days, it cried out of me in unstoppable rivers of tears. I’m not good with change, it makes me fearful and anxious. Especially now as I have no idea what’s next, where I will (be able to afford to) live and how I’ll manage considering I don’t even know what type of work I’ll do when I’ve recovered from this long-lasting burn out. A lot of things are up in the air and I never thought this would be what my life would be like at midlife.

Even so…

I’d like to express my heartfelt gratitude in this post to my wonderful home of so many years. I want to thank it for everything it gave us, for how well it protected us and for all the memorable moments we were lucky to have there together.

We love you, always.