At the end of 2014, we moved house. In fact, we moved suburb, schools, uprooted every routine and hedged our bets on living a remarkably different lifestyle. But that’s not the house I want to talk about today. We migrated to this home only after living in the home where our family began.
While it’s pretty standard for long-term relationshippers to eventually opt to live together, it was a little more complex for us, because I was the head of a single parent household and he a well-entrenched-in-his-habits bachelor.
We may have disagreed on prospective houses during our search, but when we found Number 32, the three of us just knew. Number 32 wasn’t just the next place we looked at, but the home where we’d begin to build a life together.
Fast forward three years, and we live somewhere else. We live in a home that works for the grown-up version of us. This is the family that’s been through it, stuck through it and grown up.
When we made the decision to move – a decision that started formulating in our heads when we made a family commitment to add a dog to our troops – and then found the house we loved the most, I remember feeling wholly frustrated.
Even though we’d found the house we loved in our new neighbourhood, we lived in a home we already loved. Each room was familiar, with the eccentric light switches, dings in the wall and funny food splatters that sprang from those evenings where I’d become “experimental” in the kitchen. The courtyard where we’d sun ourselves, share afternoons with friends and laugh about our lives, had a story etched into each paving stone.
But once we’d found our next dream house, our home suddenly began feeling a little too small, a little less inviting…a little less home. Every room felt too small or too bright. Before I could blink though, boxes were being packed, applications for new telephone lines were being submitted and we were winding up our accounts and plastering our forwarding address on post.
My kid and I woke up one morning about a week before we moved, ridiculously early, at 3am. We ran downstairs for tea and cookies, and watched the sun come up while chatting over morning cartoons. There was something in that sunrise.
The way the light gently filtered into the lounge reminded me so much of the day we’d first walked in to Number 32. Of how my kid had careened up the stairs to find out how big her bedroom was, and how my boyfriend had claimed his man-cave as the ultimate spot to hang out.
Walking down the passageway I’d walked down a million times, I remembered all the events our house had held for us. The time I’d thrown myself on the bed and cried hysterically with fear, because I was facing the biggest career change of my life. The time it rained on my kid’s birthday and we had to have her birthday party indoors – with 40 people in a tiny townhouse. I could feel the many nights we’d spent rejoicing with bubble baths and giggles, and how my daughter had now grown too tall for it to be comfortable with two of us in the tub anymore.
As we closed off our last week in our family beginner home, that frustration disappeared. Instead, we celebrated. We’d yell “last lunch to be made here!” or “final dinner on this stove!” and, of course, “last bubble bath here tonight!”
And as the moving truck pulled out and we packed the last box in the car, I could’ve sworn Number 32 smiled at us, as we closed the door.
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