Enough is…..enough.

It was one of those conversations.  The kind that feels significant before either of you have actually said anything.  The kind that fills up the room with unspoken things which, when finally uttered, change everything.

Some backstory:

We live in paradise.  By we, I mean the inscrutable-seven of us as outlined in my last post.  And by paradise, I mean just that: a seven-bedroomed home with a massive garden, pool, entertainment area and five bathrooms.  Six, if you count the outside one next to the storeroom opposite the second kitchen. Located in the leafiest of leafy suburbs in the Upper Highway area of Durban.  Paradise, because we have so much space.  Paradise, because each of us has our own room and the benefit of privacy whenever we want it.  Paradise, because we have all the stuff that you would expect to find in all that space.  A car each.  A boat.  A quad bike for the kids.  A trackbike for Dean. A spokey bushel of mountain bikes for all of us. A library for Jen.

Yes, a library.

All the trappings of a successful life in a beautiful setting.

Did I say trap?

I haven’t always lived like this.  The old family joke about restless blood never rings truer than when examining my packing history.  I’ve lived in 12 different towns in three different countries and moved, on average, once a year since I was born.  I was glad, when we bought the house, to be planting some serious roots.  Dean’s life has been a bit more settled, and it was his house before it was ours together.  His uncanny ability to do fast math and calculate risk on the spot secured him, and eventually us, a bargain in a fantastic neighbourhood – close to all the good schools and relatively untouched by crime.  A sound investment.  A mature and carefully thought-out roadmap for the future.  Exactly the kind of lifestyle his hard-working Dad had given him, and exactly in keeping with the Accepted Plan.  What could go wrong?

Nothing.  Everything.

We’ve both been so unhappy.  So unhappy.  The kind of unhappy that makes you sit down in front of a professional listener once a week so that you can cry miserably about your life in the full awareness that you live in paradise with absolutely no reason to be unhappy. The kind of unhappy that pops little white pills with morning coffee in the hope of keeping the screaming in your head at bay for a few hours. The kind of unhappy that claws at your insides from the moment you wake up in the morning in your perfect house next to the person you love till the moment you kiss your beloved family good night and go to bed, having slaved all day for the privilege of those too-short moments.  The kind of unhappy that makes you wonder, idly as you drive over the Inanda Road Bridge, whether your life insurance will pay out enough to look after them all should your hand drift momentarily from the wheel….

These were not good times.

Fortuitously, and as has often happened in the past, Dean and I managed to get to roughly the exact same amount of Enough at the same time.  Enough of being miserable.  Enough of being permanently exhausted.  Enough of drifting further and further away from each other in a sea of endless responsibilities.  Enough.  Time to talk.

It didn’t take us long to get there, once we started.  Amid the deluge of unhappy words, one was recurrent.

The house.

The endless expense.  The endless maintenance.  The endless drain on resources.  A never-ending battle against entropy.  A sense of waste.  So much space and so much stuff, and yet no time to enjoy any of it because we both have to work every minute of every day to afford it all and to keep it from falling apart.  And all the while, our children play alone in their rooms or alone in the massive expanse of garden, waiting patiently for us to be finished working, finished fixing, finished cleaning so that they can have a bit of our non-existent time.

We’ve no time and barely enough money in spite of that fact that we both earn extremely well in our respective professions, and the only thing benefiting from our combined efforts as a family is the pile of bricks and mortar we’ve somehow sold our souls to.  The house.

Something else, too.  Something less definable.  In the days since The Conversation, we’ve tried to articulate this sense of Not-Sure-What to each other and the best we can come up with is….it’s not us.  It doesn’t suit us.  We don’t fit.  We never have.  The cookie-cutter Stepford nature of our lily-white suburbia has never sat well with me, and it doesn’t suit Dean either.  The clues have been there for ages, too.  When we travel, we deliberately seek out accommodation that looks nothing like what we have at home.  We’ve stayed in urban apartments in the middle of cities, hippy communes, compact studios, artist’s lofts and even (my personal favourite) tee-pee tents. We seek out culturally diverse neighbourhoods and immerse ourselves in them.  We avoid suburbs.  And then we go home to the quintessence of one.

It’s paradise, yes.  Just not our version.

Dean, whispering half to himself: “Let’s sell it.”
Me, holding my breath and scarcely daring to hope that I’d heard him right: “Are you serious?”
Dean, nodding: “Yes.  I’ve had enough. I can’t do this anymore”.
Me, looking incredulous and elated at the same time: “OMG baby, ME TOO!!”.

And just like that, the decision was made.  What followed was an increasingly excited exchange of new ideas, relieved affirmation, planning, dreaming and laughing out loud at the audacity of our burgeoning New Plan.  I’d been too busy and too miserable to notice that we’d stopped talking about the future or daydreaming together, and it felt incredible to be suddenly doing it again.   We were giddy with relief.  We still are.

The New Plan isn’t a unique one.  It’s been done before.  The downsized, debt-free, off-grid-tiny-home-on-a-piece-of-land ala Captain Fantastic isn’t a new concept and, as a brief trawl through literally-any-blogsite will tell you, more and more people seem to be opting for it in a bid to escape the anachronistic version of ‘success’ that keeps them slave to a mortgage and maintenance for years and years.  We’ve decided to join them because what we really want instead is…enough:

Enough time to do the things that give our lives meaning and spark joy.
Enough time to make memories with the people we love.
Enough space for the things we really need, and no more than that.
Enough money and time to travel the world.  Together.  Alone.  With the kids.  With everyone.  Everywhere.

That’s more than enough for us.