I love my house.

I moved in the summer before the pandemic hit. It was a big downsize after my divorce. I was so, so tired. I just wanted to rest and be SAFE. And it’s given me that, these four walls. If my life goes to shit all over again, I can afford it. I can still pootle along gently. I can breathe.

I’ve also questioned myself, again and again, if I did the right thing.

I’ve worried I’m lazy. That not going bigger and better and working harder and earning more and aiming higher and having more ambition is a cop out. That I chose retreat. That licking my wounds and living smaller (and out of catchment) and cutting out big rooms (and cars and holidays) might ruin my life, and the Smalls’ lives in turn.

Well the cost of living crisis has sort of put paid to that… As interests rates hike again I’m increasingly grateful for my cowardice/caution. (And the Big Small, after months of worry, is going up to big school with all her mates – also a massive relief).

I still love my house. I love that I can walk to the shop, and the vet, and the pharmacy, and the take-away, and the park. I love my neighbours, and my community. I love the security.

But some days, these same four beloved walls press in HARD.

Some days, I think I hate it, too.

For a start I hate that there is always something to do, and fix, and clean, and sort out, and spruce up – in an oppressive cycle we were never told about as kids, drawing the dream, the red roof, the four windows and front door in the middle, stripes of blue and green top and bottom. A starburst sun in the corner.

I hate the fact nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever DONE. You can’t stick it on the fridge with a magnet and just forget about it and move on to the next thing.

I hate that after four years it has inexplicably filled back up with all the junk I worked so hard to eliminate so we could fit into it in the first place.

I hate that post pandemic my life is STILL shrunk mostly to these rooms. To a short circuit around them, of school runs, and supermarket shops, drs appointments and very little that is much further afield, off the paper.

I hate that like millions of home workers, I feel the weight of the privilege of being able to pick up and drop off kids, put a wash on, wear pyjama bottoms and drink tea in the garden – and the pressure of being seen to be present and productive and switched on at all times.

I hate that I am on my own in it. Because funnily enough as a child I never drew stick me outside it, all alone. I drew company.

I hate that I am so often so lonely, here. So claustrophobic. Chafing at my boundaries. When I feel I am spring-loaded in my own body, ready to leap out of the picture, hurl myself off the set tracks I laid so deliberately.

I hate that as soon as I leave it all I want to do is get back to it.

I feel all of this particularly hard after the death of my dad.

I suppose it is partly the classic carpe diem of grief, wanting to feel and experience and expand to fill what life and time there is left. Like him, I am also on an ever-shifting continuum between the Myers Brigg I and E – sometimes drawing energy from others but needing time to recharge on my own.

And the balance right now is… off.

Some days I’m conscious the only real-life adult interactions I have are the small talk conversations at the school gate, at which I am only partially successful. This is not the social life I imagined for my adult self.

When the kids return, they have used up their own quota of other-people energy at school, or at their dad’s, and they want to veg, to hibernate, to retreat into their own little home world and not come out – not go out.

When the most anxious Small is particularly anxious, I cannot pry her from the house at a weekend with either force or bribery, and she rebels at the thought of my inviting others into her safe space. Babysitters and having mates round for an evening cuppa is not always possible, here. Bedtime isn’t always easy. This is not something people always understand.

There are days when I feel trapped in my own home, a prisoner of a nest I created. A haven which has also limited my horizons, a safety net that has become a sticky web – pulling my limbs down harder the harder I fight it.

And always always, just behind my shoulder, out of sight, is the knowledge of the spider that is waiting to eat me – the doom that stalks all of the anxious. (I wonder where she gets it from).

I’m not quite sure that there are answers.

I think that this – this trapped feeling – is maybe just… middle age. A combination of the squeeze of responsibility, the boredom of monotony, the gaping hole of loss, the reality of physical/hormonal exhaustion, the tick of the clock, the double-edged sword of home-working, the challenge of raising kids wired differently – in a world too fucked up to make safe for them.

This, of course, is the junction at which men start wearing sports blazers, buying two seater cars, developing a coke habit and dating women 15-20 years their junior.

As a woman my options are more limited. An extra glass of wine, maybe. A spring clean. Fluff up and feather the nest with a trip to Dunhelm and a few different cushions and lamps… Possibly a kitten.

I think as women we are often better at understanding how love and hate live together, under one roof, two sides of one of sheet of paper, scrunched up into a ball. We are so used to feeling more than one thing at once, often in direct opposition, and feeling the feeling rather than seeking a solution to the dissonance.

And we are good at smoothing out the wrinkles, placing it carefully in a memory box, starting over with a fresh sheet, every day if that’s what’s necessary.

This summer, I definitely need to draw some new lines.

Wish me luck.

xxx