If I had a pound for every time someone told me that my house was just bricks and mortar and that I shouldn't have any attachment to it, then I'd probably be wealthy enough to buy, well, my ex out, and stay in the home I am so inexplicably (apparently) attached to.
Actually, there is nothing inexplicable about it at all. My attachment is quite straightforward: this house was once the mothership of all my hopes and dreams. Big things were going to happen here and it was to be a stepping stone to even bigger and better things.
We fought to buy it: us up against a builder who wanted to renovate it and get it back on the market. Us who wanted to renovate it and turn it into a family home.
Along the way it also became the focus of all our rows and arguments. Flare ups over jobs that hadn't been done, disagreements over finances, project management and the time it took to complete things. But eventually most of it did get done, although for me, the moment it really became a family home wasn't when we put in new floors and a new bathroom and kitchen, and knocked down dividing walls and put new ones up. To me it officially got its family home status one sunny March afternoon in 2003, when my little boy was born on the living room floor.
I am sitting typing this in the same spot.
To my left, on top of the piano, there are two pictures; one of him minutes after he was born, red faced and angry, a curled fist pressed to his lips. The second, taken about thirty minutes later, he is cleaned up, cuddly and chubby in a Tigger sleepsuit.
That sleepsuit is up in my loft. Along with all his other baby clothes.
I'm very good at attachment, but I struggle with letting go.
What do you think? Should Kelly move on?