Now at the end of her first real estate buying journey, Maya Muir embarks on happily ever after.
In my wildest dreams, I never thought that I’d end up living in a quiet, family-orientated suburb, in a house with a white picket fence. When my teenage self pictured the adult me, I lived fancy free in an inner-city apartment. Yet here I am, in a cute cottage-like villa with the love of my life, married and not even thirty. Isn’t it strange the places life takes you sometimes?
After months of searching for it, we have now settled into our home. Yes, we are using a cardboard box as a bin but it is our cardboard box. Besides, as a good friend of mine said to me, filling our house with things is secondary; filling it with memories and our love is what is most important.
On our first night I was surprisingly sad. It was surprising because I have said goodbye to many homes before – first my mother’s at 13, then many foster homes and later, when I ventured into the big bad world, roommates’ homes. I assumed, being the aficionado of migration that I am and the fact that I was finally moving into a home that I’d dreamt about owning, this time the move would be painless.
I was so excited about decorating and finally having an entire houseful of privacy that I was completely unprepared for what I did feel. I lay in our bedroom on that first Sunday night, feeling a strange mixture of sadness and nostalgia. I was grateful that we still had the same bed to sleep in and that my lover was beside me. I guess that experiencing what it was like to live with my girlfriend and her mother, in their happy family home, has touched me more deeply than I’d realised.
When I think about all the hardships that others are suffering right now, families losing their homes because the owners are putting rent prices up astronomically, I know how lucky I am. When I think about how I used to wonder where my next home would be and how I don’t need to wonder anymore, I feel incredibly grateful. I suppose that was also part of the nostalgia I felt on my first night in my new home – I was saying goodbye to an era in my life.
There’s newness now to everything. New furniture, new bus routes to work, new neighbours. Our relationship has entered a new phase and feels different, in lots of little ways. (My girlfriend does the dishes now – that’s new!) I feel different too.
As much as I love this new phase, I don’t want to blend into suburbia. I have two sides of myself jostling for predominance – my innate nesting instinct and the girl who thrives on adversity. It would be so easy to let the nurturer within me take over and have the girl who used to dye her hair flamingo pink drift into oblivion.
So, where do I go from here? Thankfully, not everything is new. Our friends are still the same people who are not going to help us impress the neighbours. When we had them over last Thursday night for dinner, dinner turned into drinks, which then turned into falling over raucously drunk on the front lawn at midnight.
It seems that since we’ve moved into our new home, the need for me to be responsible has actually lessened. Buying my own home has given me a sense of security which in turn has given me more freedom. Maybe I don’t have to give up my inner child after all. Maybe I’ve finally given her a home.
