The expensive goodbye
On selling the house that saved us
On a January “grey wool socks” kind of Saturday — cozy, bland, kind of itchy — I found myself standing amidst IKEA bags and Good Food boxes loaded with stuffies, picture books, and friendship bracelets, utterly overwhelmed and in tears. I’d just spent hours decluttering and packing up 18 years of memories in my daughter’s room.
I’ve decided to sell my house this year. The home I raised my babies in. The home I worked so hard to keep after my marriage ended.
If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been lately, it’s been here, preparing for one of the toughest transitions of life. And boy, do I have a lot of feelings about this.
The loudest feelings are sadness and something older, dirtier than failure — the particular shame of a life you almost pulled off.
The house feels like a museum of the woman I was planning to become. Every unfinished corner holds an exhibit she never got to open. And the cruel irony of THIS museum is that nobody chose to build it. It just... accumulated. Room by room. Year by year. While she was busy keeping everyone else alive.
It’s like the big box DIY version of my neglected craft cupboard, except instead of mandala colouring books and half-completed cross-stitch kits, it’s spots that needed care, attention, investment and now take $10K a piece off my sale value.
The kitchen, where I spent so much time lovingly creating meals to nourish my family, hasn’t had so much as a paint job in 20 years. I always wanted to renovate it, to give myself a “dream kitchen,” so I tolerated the medicinal yellow walls and ignored the cracked tiles, the splintering countertop, and just churned out the hits.
The upstairs hallway light I had installed stopped working after the roofers got a bit too stompy. I forget it doesn’t work until guests ask where the light switch is, and I wave vaguely at the ceiling like it explains everything. The things I got around to are now also victims of time — the fence we built when we moved in is falling down, the bathroom renovated on my first maternity leave is showing its age.
Like a properly trained Armenian woman, I have a running loop of what people will think. She couldn’t maintain it. She couldn’t afford it. She gave up.
They’re not entirely wrong. I couldn’t maintain a 100-year-old house on my own. Not the way I thought I was supposed to. There was no Architectural Digest shoot happening here (though we did end up in the paper for other reasons a few times). I was not cut out to be some social media content creator who documents every DIY job in exchange for Home Depot sponsorships, so things just… deteriorated slowly.
Despite my extreme pride at being a woman who owns a house on her own, it turns out that maintaining a house on one income and one set of arms is a huge undertaking.
But more than just a vessel that sheltered us from storms, this 2+1 bedroom east-end semi housed every version of us that has existed, from crying babies and snotty toddlers, to hormonal middle schoolers and restless lockdown teens. All of them, under this one stubborn roof.
A life can’t be contained in a structure, yet the walls and floorboards here are teeming with the tales of how we lived. And now here we are, 3 adults. And much like this rickety, creeky pile of well-loved but neglected bricks, my body and my life are asking me to find a way to give them more attention and love.
Vintage “2017 Nadine” hustled hard so she could buy this house off her ex-husband and keep her kids in the only home they’d known. Running on equal parts delusional self-belief and desperation, she built relationships with champions at the exec table, stepped out onto scary ledges and stages. She got the promotion that gave her the raise that helped her buy this house (thanks to my mortgage broker, Marcy). The nest would remain intact, even if the little chicks sometimes slept at their dad’s. Phew!
That Nadine didn’t know that was coming. She knew only that she could not imagine putting her kids through one more upheaval. We’d already been through a significant medical crisis with one kid a few years earlier, and the pain of their dad leaving was already so much to hold. She wanted to be the anchor. The steady. The lighthouse in the storm.
But she was running on love and guilt in equal measure, with no idea how to ask for help or protect her future self. That’s not a criticism of her, it’s a eulogy. She did what she could with what she knew. And the house was the proof she could hold it together.
I’m not mad at her. I want to hug her, actually. She did exactly what she knew how to do. Survive. I just wish someone had handed her a permission slip sooner.
“This house is our Encanto,” I often told the kids. The house was magic. The equity in the house saved me when I took a mandatory pay cut during COVID to keep the company I worked for afloat. It saved us when we needed to pay for tutors or other accommodations for the way our brains work. Along with my family’s generosity, it helped us take important trips on occasion.
But then interest rates went way up. I changed careers and started back a few spaces. And I ran out of moves. One full paycheque goes to having and maintaining the house every month now. One. Entire. Paycheque.
I know the morning the mortgage comes out. I'm always awake at midnight, the blue glow of my phone the only light in a very empty room. Even though I already know what I'm going to see, my jaw tightens anyway. I close the app before I start doing the other math — the one that figures out who gets what cut of my next paycheque, or the one that calculates how many hours of sleep I have left before I have to function like a person. I tell myself not to panic, because panic doesn’t pay for groceries and it definitely doesn’t fix plaster.
My “kids” aren’t kids anymore. And it’s tough to know what the future might hold for them in this economy and world. We’re in a strange limbo — one living away most of the year, the other on the brink of an apprenticeship. The nest is emptying. And I'm the one who has to decide what comes next for the bird who built it.
Life doesn’t wait for you to be ready. After my burnout last year, I called a real estate agent to talk through the possibility of selling in the fall of 2025. I was just feeling out the idea. We were already in transition: Nate finishing his last year, Lucy having just started at university… all of it proving tougher on the team than we imagined.
I wasn’t ready yet. I decided I wanted one more Christmas here, the three of us.
“Don’t worry about the furniture,” the realtor said, going through the list of things I would have to do to prepare, “We’re going to make your house look like a showroom.” Sigh. All my carefully curated art and found objects, the spots where smudgy fingerprints linger… “What can you live without for a while?” she asked tenderly.
We’d start by clearing out and painting Lucy’s room all white. The hardest part wasn’t pulling down her ephemera, the hallmarks of an indie songwriter's bedroom. What broke all our hearts was painting over the ceiling we’d hand-painted on the Family Day weekend after their dad moved out. The kid was Harry Potter-obsessed at the time, and I wanted to give her a wizard-worthy room.
After getting the painter to give the ceiling a dark blue hue, we stood on the top bunk and took turns carefully painting gold stars on the ceiling. Nate got creative at one point… I think he was trying to paint a nebula that I later tried to turn into a spaceship to save it. So many nights spent looking up at our artwork while snuggled, reading a book, or simply falling asleep together.
Other than the house itself, the ceiling was the most emblematic of the ashes I pulled myself out of in 2017. I asked my current platonic life partner/wifey, Natalie, to come photograph the ceiling. But even still, when the first roller began the work of hiding who we’d been, we all grieved.
I built this room, this entire house, to be a harbour. Safe, cozy, always here to bring the ships in. And now I’m the one dismantling it — packing up the stuffies and the Hot Wheels, and painting over the pencil marks on the kitchen doorframe that charted how fast they were leaving me anyway.
The complicated truth of this stage of parenting is that making this place less of a harbour is the most mothering thing I can do right now. The lighthouse doesn’t follow the ships out to sea. It just keeps the light on and trusts they know how to navigate.
That’s the part that’s proving harder than I imagined.
Recently, during my favourite bedtime routine of “Question all your life choices!”, I remembered something my former business partner called flip the pancake: find another way to look at what you’re lying in so you don’t burn.
The flip? This appreciating asset has kept three neurospicy humans housed, fed, and educated through illness, single parenthood, a pandemic, and whatever the hell we’re calling this economy. As Natalie would say, “The house did its job, Nadine.”
The lighthouse doesn’t follow the ships out to sea 😭😭😭😭😭
NADINE, this is profoundly beautiful and aching; what a loving and illuminating testament to you, the other Nadine's who paved the way, and your love for a world that is so much better with you in it xo