When your picket-fence dreams crumble in the messy aftermath of divorce, packing up and starting afresh can make a change feel like a nightmare. But the heart finds a home of its own, and it isn’t long before you realise that love is the only address you need.
When I moved into my dream home in 1999, with my husband and a month-old baby, I told everyone who would listen that I fully intended to move out of that house in a box.
On the first weekend February this year, my teenage daughters and I celebrated having been in our new home for a year. When you’re young and starry-eyed, you don’t foresee changes like divorce.
My picket fence dreams were all tied up in that somewhat ramshackle house with its bay windows and wooden floors, and a garden that felt like a wonderland for ladybirds and fairies. And now it stood empty, host only to the dust motes silently drifting down on sunbeams while the genet scrabbled in the roof.
Almost 17 years later I was directing movers into a new house, in a typical Johannesburg thunderstorm, hoping and praying that the bakkie carrying my piano had found a bridge to shelter under.
Moving was quite possibly the most exhausting thing I’ve done in years. It’s doubly exhausting when you have the emotional component of a divorce attached. You slowly separate out the ‘his’ and ‘hers’ that were merged for so long, while you’re trying to ease the transition for children who are the collateral damage in a war that is not of their making.
So it was exhausting, yes, but it also incredibly liberating, because in moving to a much smaller house, I’ve had to look critically at the detritus of 17 years in a house whose cupboards I thought I could never fill. I had to look at all of that stuff and decide what I really needed to keep – what would make the new house feel like home.
I got rid of a lot of stuff. My girls got rid of a lot of stuff. Their new rooms better reflect their more grown-up outlook on life. And it was hard to let go, but it was also a positive rite of passage. And a year after we moved in, we are still finding things we can do without. Who needs three tea sets, for crying out loud? Who needs that many clothes?
One of my daughters, who took the move the hardest, clung to the last of her childhood toys like an amulet, her subconscious hope that none of this was happening playing out in the things she held onto. But even she spent this past summer holiday shedding most of those toys. A year in, this feels like home, and those talismans no longer serve her.
Things have moved and shifted from space to space as we’ve found better places for them to live. Cupboards have seen their contents moved forwards and backwards, up and down, to fit the unconscious choreography of the way we move through this house. We’ve remembered where everything is now; we can put our hands on what we need without too much thought.
I was so worried that my children would not settle in the new home, given the emotional upheaval it represented, given that it was the first time they’d ever had to move. But children are amazingly resilient and they rose to the challenge, doggedly packing and unpacking till the sound of packing tape being unfurled set our collective teeth on edge.
We stood in our new home on that Saturday evening in February, shoulder-deep in boxes, with only half the electricity working thanks to a wet circuit in the electricity box. Our bumbling Golden Retriever in his cone of shame blithely ripped our legs open as he blundered past us in spaces to narrow for his lampshade silhouette.
Our confused Staffie sat shaking at the fury of the thunder outside, and a quiver of exhaustion ran through our bodies. But despite all that, our new house felt like home from the very first minute we were alone in it, when the movers and our army of supportive friends had left.
Because we had each other, we had the things that were important to us, and we were safe and dry. And when it comes down to it, if you need to make a house a home, you don’t need three tea sets or a massive garden, or a certain address.
All you really need is love.
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