What do you do within the hours after your husband has left the marital dwelling, bringing down the curtain on a 24-year marriage? Collapse in a heap? Get a daring new haircut? Open the Champagne? All legitimate choices. However when, with a mix of disappointment and reduction, I watched him drive away from our Wiltshire dwelling one sunny Saturday afternoon, I made a decision to distract myself. By constructing a wall.
Really, I repaired a wall on the fringe of our terrace that was lacking a number of bricks. An hour later, as I surveyed my handiwork, I realised it may very well be straighter, nevertheless it was strong and I felt proud. All of us have mates who’ve spent weekends sanding flooring, sourcing the proper door handles and remodelling kitchens. In the complete time we lived in our dwelling, my ex-husband and I painted a number of partitions and cabinets, but when something extra sophisticated wanted to be completed, we both paid somebody or left it. It was each laziness and a insecurity.
My ex was deeply resistant to vary and to something that smacked of guide labour. ‘You do it if you wish to,’ was his commonplace response. However after 18 years, our home regarded drained and cluttered, each floor strewn with defunct computer systems, ornaments and outdated cash. Very similar to our relationship, we had failed to take a position effort and time into placing issues proper.
Because the cracks actually began to point out, we spent cash having enjoyable, entertaining and happening vacation, quickly cheering ourselves up as a substitute of addressing the actual issues. It wasn’t till I started divorce proceedings, which meant promoting the household dwelling, that I felt motivated to do one thing.
My ex moved into the spare room as a result of, like many separating {couples}, we couldn’t afford our mortgage and to hire a separate dwelling. For six months we co-existed, pretty amicably – partly for the sake of kids, but additionally as a result of, whereas the wedding itself was a wreckage, we nonetheless bought on all proper.
When our relationship started to unravel some years earlier, after a sequence of revelations that left me reeling, I’d been afraid of divorce and decided the youngsters wouldn’t lose the one dwelling they knew – at the least not whereas they had been within the emotionally uneven waters of the teenage years, exams and Covid lockdowns. We tried marriage counselling, however extra revelations got here, tearing aside the delicate cloth of our relationship.
Then, final yr, after one other betrayal, and with the youngsters on the cusp of their grownup lives, I made a decision to take management of my future, relatively than keep on the sickening seesaw of hope and heartbreak, forgiveness and fury. I utilized for a divorce and felt overwhelming reduction.
The kids, though devastated, supported the choice, though it meant promoting the home. We’d moved there after they had been two and 4, and all their vital recollections had been related to it. With zero price range to present it a presale facelift, I made a decision to do it myself, not paralysed by doubt.
My first job was to color the cream-coloured exterior, which was trying grubby and worn. Our dwelling began life within the 1840s as a small, thatched cottage, however was prolonged through the years to turn into a four-bedroom home, which meant quite a lot of paint. My ex maintained his allergy to guide labour, so I balanced atop ladders to succeed in underneath the eaves and slithered on my stomach alongside the ridge of the conservatory to repaint the struts, bracing each muscle in my core to keep away from wobbling and spilling paint all around the glass panes – or falling via them.
A number of the patio slabs had been damaged, so I regarded up ‘the best way to combine cement’ on YouTube and laid new ones. The transformation was rapid – the home was immediately improved, and so had been my muscle tissue and confidence.
The day my ex lastly drove away, I tackled the wall. ‘Shouldn’t you get an expert builder?’ requested my son as I combined a recent batch of cement, sporting ballet pumps and a defiant expression. ‘To interchange a number of bricks?’ I scoffed. ‘Simple.’ And it was: not dissimilar to creating butter icing and sandwiching collectively a Victoria sponge. The entire thing felt satisfying and surprisingly symbolic: if I might rebuild the wall, I might rebuild my life, with a little bit – or relatively lots – of assist.
My son mowed and strimmed the garden, my daughter painted the kitchen. Girlfriends helped me declutter. The home felt lighter and brighter. And so did I. One other buddy got here along with his shovel and spent all day spreading eight tons of recent gravel throughout the drive. My neighbour, an accountant, helped me undergo my funds for the divorce. One other neighbour changed a rotten balustrade after I almost fell via it. His accomplice got here with dousing rods and burning sage to ‘cleanse’ the home of detrimental vitality. Though I’m not normally a believer in such issues, I discovered the ritual curiously comforting.
Then, the weekend earlier than the primary viewings, my mother and father mowed, polished, hoovered and dusted. Surveying the home and backyard afterwards, I used to be thrilled with what I – we – had completed. All the assistance, laughter and companionship of the last few months had lifted my spirits at a time after I thought I’d be lonely and harassed. However greater than that, I realised that, emotionally and bodily, I used to be far stronger than I’d imagined (certainly this bodes properly for beginning life by myself after 25 years). And I wasn’t alone. Maybe the agonising half was that every one my labours had been in pursuit of a aim: promoting the home. The house that I had now fallen again in love with and that I now felt I couldn’t bear to go away.
Now, each time I snuggled on the couch in my newly organized sitting room, or luxuriated in my now solo bed room, I felt the wrench of imminent loss. After I handed via the doorway the place we marked the youngsters’s heights as they grew, I used to be crushed by the concept that somebody would quickly paint over them. If ending my marriage was arduous, dropping the house that I had rebuilt – alongside rebuilding myself – felt even more durable.
And but, deep down, I knew it had completed its job. The home had been the proper nest to nurture my two fledglings, and whereas I’d constructed some fantastic friendships round its kitchen desk, I knew I might carry the desk and the friendships to my new dwelling. My ex was extraordinarily beneficiant and allowed me to not solely take many of the furnishings to the brand new home, however – in recognition of all my work and that I would want to supply a house base for our kids – an important share of the home sale proceeds. His amenable perspective meant that our divorce has been extra amicable than I assumed attainable.
They are saying that animals know when it’s time to maneuver on – rabbits dig new burrows, birds construct new nests. And I might, too, in time. I might feather a brand new nest, with a little bit – or lots – of assist, and with a confidence and power that I didn’t have earlier than.