About a year and a half ago my parents sold the house that I grew up in.
It wasn’t just the house that I grew up in.
It’s the house where my sister, and then many years later, my daughter, were brought home to sleep in a crib within walls that had already seen the beginnings of two other women in my family.
The house was in my family for four generations, although at one point, there was a fifth.
My childhood was spent in that little (kind of too little) Cape on a hill. I lived with my great-grandmother, my grandparents, and my mom.
Later on, for a few years, I lived there with my grandparents, my parents, and my daughter.
Then one by one we died or disbanded, and now that house belongs to another family.
Ask anyone who knows me well what kind of house is my dream, and they’ll tell you the same thing:
The one where I can afford a pool boy.
After watching my parents struggle to upkeep the house they owned, which grew harder for them with each year both physically and financially, I knew I didn’t want to buy a house if I were going to have to do it alone.
Or if I couldn’t have a pool boy.
Here’s my line of thinking: I can’t afford to buy a house until I can afford to employ a pool boy for the pool that would be necessary for me to consider buying the house.
It checks out as a good idea, and yes, it’s something to dream and wish for.
At this point in my life, I don’t want to dream or wish any harder than I already have been doing.
Just like yesterday when I said you can’t win if you don’t play, that’s not just about spoils and riches.
It’s about taking risks, rolling the dice, doing what scares you, and doing what your heart and whole self want most.
I want to be able to comfortably afford to live with Bobby in a place that has some walls and a roof.
And heat and indoor plumbing.
Right now, I couldn’t give a shit about thinking far enough into the future to consider my dream home.
If I were to explain my “dream home” I’d probably end up in tears, and ain’t nobody got time for that before work.
Unfortunately, work trumps dreams right now.
Struggling financially leaves very little room for dreaming, let alone for wishing and trying to believe that one day those dreams will be real.
So, at the moment, and maybe forever, my dream home is the one that my parents sold out from under me.
The house that effectively, in my mind and heart, was my home.
The place where I spent every Christmas morning of my life, where I helped garden with my Pop-Pop until I got too skeeved out by bugs, where my grandmother taught me how to blow bubbles with my gum, where my dad proposed to my mom and me.
Every inch of every wall held a memory – memories that belong to my family and mine alone because my grandparents built that house for our family.
This sale of this house was not my choice.
I wasn’t considered, I wasn’t asked, I was just told.
I do understand that my parents owned the house and it was their right to do what they wanted with it, but I don’t think what they did was right.
While I was in no financial position to buy the house from them like my mom did from her parents, I really would have appreciated at least having the chance to consider it and try, but they robbed me of that.
No one in the family seems to care but me.
I tell Bobby my home is with him, no matter where we are, but even he argued.
Sometimes houses turn into homes, homes turn into part of your heart.
That’s the house that will always be home to me – the one filled with my family, making memories for as long as we can.
That is my dream home.
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