I was out looking at properties yesterday.
The plan is to buy a new home and move from here so my ex can move back into what he now owns by himself.
The matrimonial home is in one of the most beautiful and expensive neighbourhoods in the city. It is vast, and it is full of one hundred year old wood. It is stunning and I will miss it. I will miss my garden (sadly neglected this year), I will miss it's ramble, how it just goes on and on in an old and creaky way.
I saw many places yesterday, some were just houses, others were homes. And they border the area of wealth I now live in.
My hope is to find something close enough that my girls are safe, that elder can walk confidently back and forth from the subway, and that without use of a car, I can get younger back and forth from school.
To do this will take most of what I now have as a settlement.
There is one home I am interested in. An estate sale. Old and tired, fridge weeping onto the floor, the basement a damp little dungeon. It reminds me of our first home, down to the hideous and peeling wallpaper in one room.
It will require immediate work on the main things, electrical and plumbing, the rest, the cosmetics I can chip away at over the years.
Because the home is where the heart is right? I do not have to have a grand old home full of gorgeous wood detailing to make my home lovely for my family correct?
Elder is away for the weekend and younger is with her dad.
But they stopped by yesterday to pick up her bike helmet.
mummy? mummy? she asked.
What house is bigger? she asked.
This house or the other house? (where my ex is now staying until I move).
I sat on our steps and thought about the sheer footage of both homes. The ridiculous grand beauty they both hold.
And I compared them very quickly in my head to the shabby tired little thing I had looked at earlier. I told her to ask her dad as he was probably more aware of these things, and he told her that this one was.
And I felt anger. And I felt jealousy.
Because not only do I have to find a home, a lesser house.
I also have to find a career that will see me through to retirement after twelve years of stay at home parenting.
These days I fall asleep exhausted by the spinning in my head.
And I wake at 4, with the wheels still turning.
And I toss and turn and thrash until my hound jumps onto the bed and sticks his nose into my neck. I curl up to him, and take solace from his size, from his animal smell and breath.
How am I going to do this dog? I mutter into his back
how the hell am I going to do it?I wish he could bark away my fears.