When my ex and I finally decided that we could no longer live under the same roof, co-parenting but not coupling, I knew I wanted to keep the house. After spending a year researching other options, seeing apartments, looking at other houses for sale, and envisioning starting over with a clean(er) slate, I had come to the conclusion that the home we had made, and which was being unmade, I wanted to re-make into a home of my own. This was not an easy sell, for my ex (rightly so) felt he had a larger claim to the dwelling: after all, he had built half the furniture in it, installed countless fixtures, maintained the yard, painted walls, stopped leaks, and attended to numerous other things that had helped us keep a 100 year old house from crumbling around us.
Still, I argued, I had always been the impetus to own in the first place, and could imagine myself in the house for another ten years. Since he can’t see himself tomorrow, much less a year or even five years in the future, he agreed, hesitantly and not without constant reminder of the sacrifice he was making, that he had no obligation to make, that he felt was worthy of some grand gesture of gratitude. And I was grateful: grateful I wouldn’t have to move, wouldn’t be forced to rent a place or buy a condo (all that I would be able to afford, if that), wouldn’t have to displace the kids, wouldn’t have to give up my friends in the neighborhood. I was mostly grateful that he wouldn’t get to keep the house, because in some sick way I felt I deserved it. Yet just as intensely as I felt that I was owed the house, that I was more worthy of staying in it than he, that he should be the one to suffer the displacement that came with divorce, I was also aware of how this entitled attitude had gotten us in this mess in the first place.
Once he was gone, taking only what he wanted and leaving the rest for me to sort out, it struck me what a mixed bag staying was going to be. Despite all the work my ex claimed to have done around the house, it was nothing that could match the rate of deterioration in a century-old structure. The driveway was in disrepair, the roof needed replacing, the interior walls begged for fresh paint, the faucets cried (real, wet tears) for replacement, the light fixtures were burned out, the yard was more dirt than grass, the bushes were strangling one another. After he moved out, I was paralyzed by the amount of work that needed to be done. In the seven years we lived in the house together, I had tried numerous times to prioritize the list. We had written things on the chalkboard wall in the kitchen, I wrote paper lists that we shuffled from room to room, I had created online documents to share with him. On one of the shared documents, the revision history showed that some of the items in disrepair had been “priorities” for over five years. What had seemed an impossible task list to complete together seemed altogether preposterous on my own.
As I took stock of what he had left–furniture that we had bought when we first moved east 15 years ago, linens that were sheer not on purpose but from years of use, towels that were bleached out and pilled from repeated washings, and more remnants of paint, hardware, rusted out tools, old artwork frames, dust bunnies, scuffs and holes in the walls, and other odds and ends than I had use for, I vacillated between an urge to throw it all away and a need to keep it all close. I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t get rid of it. I envied what he rued: the ability to be forced into starting over, the way I saw fit, without argument over the color of the bed linens or walls, without delayed decisions about what needed to go where and how. What he saw as a burden I saw as a release. When I visited his new house for the first time, I wanted to cry because it looked so new, so fresh, so cohesive. He’d collected the odds and ends from the basement, the garage, the attic, and had rearranged them artfully (as he always could, when push came to shove and things needed to be rearranged). The new prints his girlfriend had bought him for Christmas were hanging in our son’s room. Our daughter had a reading nook full of pillows I’d saved in our (still joint) Amazon shopping cart. He’d created a home, and I was left with a house.
So I did what I do best: I started making lists and phone calls. I found out the driveway would only cost a couple hundred dollars to fix. The electrician came and fixed the lights. I cajoled my ex into swapping out the new faucets I’d bought. I began researching new carpets, bought new frames and hung them to cover the holes in the walls. I bought new bed linens and started thinking about paint colors to complement them. I mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges. I was able to sleep peacefully at night, dreaming about all of the positive changes I had made and would make to the house. With each task I checked off the list, my house became a little bit more mine, and a whole lot more like home again.
(mostly) full disclosure 