What you're holding onto is what’s holding you back
The seismic cultural changes of the last eight years have interrupted our psyche, leaving us desperate to move on but struggling to figure out how.
Our house is built into the side of a hill, set oddly perpendicular to the street so the front door faces the back of our neighbor’s house on a thin strip of the sloping Hudson Valley. It’s a boxy thing, covered in dusky blue cedar shingles and wide picture windows that wrap around the corners. They’re Italian, probably the peak of modern design when they were installed back in 1966 and even though they rattle and leak I never get tired of the way they frame the gliding green arms of the pines that line the edges of our little patch of land.
We came to see it on Father’s Day of 2019 — Oscar was eight months old and the COVID lockdowns were eight blissful months away. Our agent had shown us more than a dozen houses by then and I was beginning to think we’d never find one that felt like home. Every place we saw felt small and dark and tired. Most places were last updated in the ‘90s with Sopranos-style shades of cream and terracotta, cherry wood cabinets and looping bits of wrought iron meant to evoke the Tuscan countryside in suburban New York. They all needed a scale of renovation I wasn’t sure our budget (or our marriage) could survive, so when our agent sent us the blue box with a modern kitchen and a creek running through the front yard I begged her to show it to us that same day.
Jory and I can’t agree on who wanted to move out of Brooklyn. I would say it was him, exhausted by the effort and anxiety of having a small child in a big city. He’d say it was me, ready to check off “buy house” on my Big Success Bingo Card. I’m sure it’s both but I honestly can’t remember. Everything that happened before March of 2020 belongs to another woman with a different understanding of the world.
Whoever pulled the trigger did well. I love our house. I love sitting on the porch to watch the sunset over the tree line; the thatch of oak leaves changing from green to gold while the mocking birds swap places with the bats and the lightning bugs tune up their soft flicker for the evening show. I love the the navy blue kitchen cabinets and the Nancy Meyers island and the way the rooms downstairs proportion the space without closing it in. I love how the sound of the creek trickles through the screen door in the living room and the way the whole house inhales when I run from room to room on the first warm day, sliding everything wide open so we can breathe it in.
When we first viewed the house I looked around for the little details a grown-up Oscar might one day remember. Those little parts of home you collect as a child, filed away for difficult days when you need to feel something solid under your feet. I looked for the fort he would build in the yard and where the sprinkler would go and where he and his friends would sit to count how many lightning bugs they’d caught while the grownups sat around the fire pit in the back. I held him tight, balanced on my hip as I walked around the house looking for glimpses of childhood peeking around corners. We put in an offer that day.
The first confirmed case of COVID in New York was at a synagogue just a few miles away from our daycare in New Rochelle. We’d only been in the house for 6 months and I remember sitting in my still pea-soup green office, peering at the red circle on google maps to see if the outbreak radius touched our childcare, as though that little red line could hold back the tidal wave of change already ripping apart the world. We had no idea the future had already been snatched out from under us, held hostage by disease and disinformation to be portioned out in cloudy two-week chunks.
Every summer we drive north to stay with our good friends on the fourth of July. They host a great barbecue with lovely people that we all enjoy but I secretly spend the afternoon waiting for the moment when the last guests have wandered off and the kids have crashed. The house slows into post-party stillness and one by one the four of us creep out from gently closed doors to take stock of our lives. We talk about work and the exhaustion of ladder climbing, about our aging parents and our growing children, about the increasingly difficult state of the world. Little plans and big plans, trying on tomorrows to see how they feel.
Every year since 2021 I’ve turned over the same dreams like stones in my pocket. A new master bathroom, more friends in our village and the biggest one of all — moving to live closer to our family in England. For four years we’ve talked it through, and for four years nothing has changed.
“What’s keeping you here?” my friend asks, as gently as the deepening sky.
“Fear.” I say, but we both know it’s a cop-out answer. The frogs sing. He waits.
“The house.” I say, finally. “Not the house itself, not like – the thing of the house. It’s the story the house was supposed to create.”
“It’s like it’s some kind of broken loop in my brain — there was a life we were supposed to live in that house and it got cut short by COVID and Trump and all that impossible pain. It fractured reality and broke open the world and now it’s like I’m stuck here, forever trying to re-start a future that was meant for someone from an entirely different past.”
Childhood trauma can freeze our development, letting our bodies grow up while our psyches stay frozen in time — but what happens when we live through it as adults? When the whole world lives through it together? Does it lash us in place, an entire population clenching to hold fast to a story that used to feel safe?
The research on trauma is slippery. Even the authors of the DSM-5 complain of the ambiguous boundaries of the word and the difficulty of diagnosis but everyone agrees that trauma causes seismic change. Depression and anxiety, flashbacks and avoidance — we focus on the disorders trauma can cause, but I think at the cost of the less namable but equally profound ways it changes our understanding of the world and our role in it.
The woman who bought this house had different values than me, different goals and aspirations. I love her but I wouldn’t change places with her, so why am I holding on to her dreams?
Imagine the fun we’d have if I finally took hold of the woman I’ve become and invited her to tell me about the future she sees.
ICYMI
📝 Practice: How to slow down and find your feet when things feel out of control
I’ve been going to the library to write. My house is quiet and my office is beautiful and I have the right snacks, but I’ve been going to the library to write. I don’t really know why. I’ve gone to coffee shops and book stores and co-working spaces but it’s not the same — I’m always a guest.
Read Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant
✌️👽
I know the focus of this post is mainly the house, but what struck me most were the parts about life before Covid and after. The impact it can have had. The woman ‘before’, etc. I’ve been struggling lately with a lot of things (aging parents the main one of late) and thinking that my sadness/anxiety/etc is stemming from that but then I go ‘well, no, maybe it goes back to x from last year’, and then ‘but then there was y from the year before’… and somehow it always comes back to 2020. Like, life in 2019 wasn’t “pErFeCt” but… and then I think oh please, I didn’t get sick, no one in my family succumbed, I wasn’t a child forced to do school online, I had solid safe housing in a blue state with a good job I could do at home. Why should the pandemic have caused ME any drama/trauma?
But I think it has in deep subtle ways. I’m still trying to tease it all out.