Two Apple Trees

I sat in the bath on Christmas Day 2023, in a desperate attempt to hide my migraine and aura from the kids and try to relax and let it subside, and just sobbed. I wanted to be a different kind of Mum to our children. I was sick of the illness that seemed to constantly derail all of the best-laid plans and I wanted to show up for them differently. I just didn’t know how to make it all go away. Jimmy tried to console me with a homemade chai latte, leaving the kids to play with the presents that they had opened from Father Christmas that morning. But he no longer knew what to say either. We felt like we were in quicksand and desperately needed a lifeline to be pulled out. Yet it felt like no one was coming to our aid. We were very much alone in the nightmare that we had created.

From the outside, we were fulfilling society’s measures of success: two healthy children, the “forever” house (even if it needed a lot of work), the idyllic English country setting, two cars, Instagram-worthy holidays, and a functioning family-owned business that was maintaining our lifestyle. Beneath this facade, however, the foundations were cracking open. There were many moments of joy, but below the surface I felt like I was suffocating.

It is clear now that the decision to buy our “forever” house was wrong for so many reasons, coming from a place of grief rather than clear thinking. But at the time we knew no different. We were riding the wave of recovery from an ectopic pregnancy which had resulted in emergency surgery, and from which I was still recovering physically and emotionally on top of a miscarriage four months prior. We had one beautiful little girl and desperately wanted to give her a sibling, but didn’t know if it would ever happen. We should have been processing this, and healing gently, but instead we moved on to other projects to numb the pain.

Both of our parents had done incredibly well from the property boom of their generation, and so had impressed upon us the financial benefits of growing our money by stretching on the mortgage and working hard to pay it off. So when it became a painful possibility that we may never have another child, we decided that the right thing to do was upsize. We felt guilty that our daughter had to live through visiting her mum in hospital as a 2-year-old, and we wanted to provide the best for her, just as our parents had for us.

So in March 2019 we saw the house for sale and fell in love with it after our first visit. On paper, we knew it didn’t really make sense. The house was on a busy main road (not ideal with kids), in a small rural village that had no pub or shop. The property was also a chalet bungalow, which didn’t fit the brief. But it left us with a feeling, one of promise and expectation. A feeling that we were still coming back to a week later when we put in an offer to buy.

When we finally moved in, having survived the painful 6-month house buying process, we vowed never to move again. We consciously made the decision that this was our “forever home”, and I would joke that Jimmy would have to carry me away from that place in a box. It felt like our fortunes had changed — I was now four months pregnant — so we started to approach life in a different way. It was no longer fluid or temporary, but instead took on a kind of permanence. We were subconsciously saying to ourselves that a big house, a perfect house, a desirable house, was a necessary element in a well-lived life. We were attaching our identities to that ideal, and became blinkered from the reality.

We had big ideas of how amazing the house could be, which made it easier to ignore how much the day-to-day firefighting was creating financial strain and consumption of our energy. We were constantly battling problems: rotten floorboards from slow leaks, split oil tanks, bees’ nests in the walls, broken water pipes, bats in the roof, collapsing wall boundaries, damp and leaking flat roofs. It was like a game of whack-a-mole. As soon as we tackled one issue, another would rear its ugly head. The sanctuary that it had been when we first moved in was becoming a noose around our necks.

When a Ukrainian mother and daughter came to stay with us, refugees escaping the war, and desperately missing their husband and father back home, I was reminded of the impermanence of it all. Our daughters were the same age, but had known such different realities growing up. Whilst our daughter drew pictures of animals and fairytales, the other drew images of war. The PTSD she was visibly suffering from was coming out in her behaviour, from nightmares to a tremor and screaming when a helicopter flew past. I felt guilty at having so much when they had so little, and was desperate to share it in any way we could.

We were rocking around in a large house, with more rooms than we knew what to do with, and they no longer had any place to call home. The more I considered the imbalance and injustice, the more discomfort I felt. I could instantly see that you could halve the rooms we had in the house, dividing them equally between two families, and we would still be perfectly comfortable. I did not feel proud of what Jimmy and I had achieved, that we had reached the point we thought we were heading for so quickly. I just felt weighed down by it all. It was tugging at my value system, the one I kept deep inside, the one that wanted to fight the injustices in this world. Meeting this heroic mother and her daughter gave me a new perspective and became the turning point for me in considering a new reality.

We had been desperately trying to keep it together, for the sake of our beautiful children that we had fought so hard for. But she showed me what really mattered. Migraine after migraine had left me frightened to leave the house, but the mess inside made me feel trapped. I wanted to regain my energy to really be present with the kids, and I came to understand that that would never happen in the place that we currently called home. Jimmy was unable to balance the demands of the business with the renovation of the house, and the kids, who had always been our first priority, were not getting our attention. It felt unsustainable and eventually I found the courage to say “enough”.

The decision felt huge, one that we never thought we would make, but on paper it was simple. When we chose to accept that it wasn’t working, we were forced to look for other solutions. We looked at the financials in a new light and realised that paying money into a house of that size, with all of the necessary remedial works and the bank’s interest rates, was not the “savings” plan we thought it was. To sell the house and downsize was the quickest way to reduce the financial and energy burden that we were experiencing, in turn reducing the financial pressure on the business and Jimmy to provide for it. It was the quickest way to get time back, and time was what we needed for the kids.

The house was the place where we finally brought our son into the world, in a birthing pool in the lounge. In the garden are two apple trees growing new life, blossoming each spring in place of the two babies that we were unable to ever hold in our arms. To walk away from that place tore a small hole in my heart, in all of our hearts, but it is not something I regret. That was a life that was not meant for me, for us. We chose to let go of the pain, the pride, the shame at having failed, and move forwards into new possibilities.

The mountains have always been a place of refuge for Jimmy and me, having first met on the slopes of Tremblant, in Canada, and so it feels fitting that we found ourselves in the mountains of the Pyrenees when the house sale went through. We had never quite found the resolve to go house shopping again, so we had left England in a campervan to start a new adventure before the last one closed out. As the last link in the house-buying chain, we didn’t have the heart to stick around and wait for it to complete. So much time, money and energy went into those five years of living in that house, and it was galling the thought of giving it up. So when the sale finally completed, I was grateful that we had distance and time under our belt, and beautiful healing surroundings in which to grieve.

Two blissful weeks of walking within the crisp mountain air, cajoling the kids up the steep mountain track through the woods, and plunging into the icy cold stream, had us all feeling more invigorated than we had for a long time. For the first time since we had left home, I was able to fully exhale during my nightly yoga practice, under the darkness of the starry night sky.

Sometimes we look back with sadness, but never with regret. Decisions in life may be painful, they may be difficult, they may evoke strong reactions in others, but that is often a sign that they are the very ones which most need to be made. I know now that I get a deeper level of contentment waking up every morning than I did in all our years there. With letting go comes a new sense of freedom, and with freedom comes life.