I Lost Myself In The Walls of This Place
We found ourselves this last year in the absolutely privileged position to be able to build our own home.
It didn’t fall upon us by chance, we’d never owned a home before and it took us until midlife to to even have the chance to do so. It was long journey to get here, I wrote about the search for a place previously. To build a roof over our heads, a roof over our children’s heads for the first time is a blessing. To no longer be at the whims and winds of landlords who decide to sell every time we settle into their homes is not something everyone gets the chance to do. We toiled for this but I also preface this piece with the knowing we are some of the lucky ones.
But I lost myself somewhere in the foundations of this place or perhaps misplaced myself in cavity of its walls.
We didn’t hand all of this project over to a contractor we kept half for ourselves. We decided to use our skills and this one chance to deliver the home we would never have to move from. We didn’t have the money for someone else do it all and so we grafted and gritted.
Our builder tragically passed away mid build which left those left behind including us feel like they were holding together the fraying ends of something that no longer felt solid. He held the project together, he knew how the puzzle pieces joined, without him no one had the picture on the box to follow.
So we took on more. My husband a Construction Manager stepped up. We would arrive weary most weekends, roll up our sleeves and work ourselves to hunger, to tears, to the edge of sanity. We kept our eyes firmly on the children sat in pile of builders rubble parented by the flashing lights of Disney movies and Netflix, to remind us of who it was all for. The guilt of pressing pause on their childhood all this time kept us digging.
We did it though, and we made a home.
But, since we arrived I have not yet found myself again.
I checked in the unpacked boxes in the attic only to find scraps of my former self scrawled in note books and collections of keep sakes.
I thought I would appear when the pictures that followed me around the world of a former place I called home were hung up on the wall.
I waited thinking when I turned the key in my lock there I would be offering a warm hug and a smile.
I sit here typing surrounded by my half finished home, blessed but half gone, living half a life, feeling like half a version of my former self. I wait here wondering how long it will take for the other parts of me to rise and rejoin me from the foundations.
I question whether I sweated and shedding so much of myself into every corner of this place that the pieces are too far dispersed to put back together again.
I am looking for me, the one who I pictured sitting here on this sofa in this home. I am longing for her return. I want her to come and make the elaborate meals she is so good at, for her to lay them out on the dining table for all the neighbours to eat. I want her to paint the walls and make rainbows of the children’s rooms. I want her to sew seeds in the garden that will grow into wildflowers just like her children. I am waiting for her to arrive.
I love this home, but I miss myself.