What Are We Really Downsizing?

My partner and I have been talking about downsizing, which is a very grown-up way of saying "the house has more bedrooms than opinions being had in them." Four of the five kids have properly moved out. Marc's still technically at home - though "technically" is doing some work there, because whenever Mom pops back from Germany he vanishes off to hers for a few days, then wanders back in announcing that his stomach has gone fully black and can no longer tolerate what he calls white people seasoning, by which he means: someone please cook something with actual flavour, and soon.

Anyway. The other day I was on the couch doing the thing I do best, which is staring at the terrace and having Big Thoughts about small domestic events, when Marc turned up with a friend and just... sat in the garden. No lunch requested. No announcement. Like a cat that has decided your garden is now also its garden.

And I sat there, watching two eighteen-year-olds do absolutely nothing on our lawn, and thought: this is either the most profound thing I've ever witnessed or I need a hobby. Possibly both.

It started me wondering what a home actually is, as opposed to a house, which I have apparently been building all these years without once stopping to ask the question. Very on brand.

Take Maya (my step-daughter). When she was retaking exams, her flatshare turned out to be the temperature of a sauna and the volume of a nightclub, so she came home for a few nights and installed herself back in her room at the top of the house, which is blessedly far from everyone and everything! She shut the door. Spread her books everywhere. Didn't come down for two days except for snacks.

Or the boys, various times, various mini-breakups, turning up with a bag and a face that says please do not ask me anything, and getting exactly that: a bed, some food, and the sacred right to say nothing whatsoever about it for at least twelve hours.

And then, as if he'd been eavesdropping on this entire piece from inside my head, Martin turned up that same day. He and Maya share a car - a whole logistical arrangement I still don't fully understand and choose not to interrogate and since Maya's travelling, he needed the keys. That was it. That was the mission. In, keys, out.

Except somewhere between the door and the garage, a pair of trousers materialised.

"Hey Mom, while I'm here - button?"

And I actually laughed out loud (in my head), in my kitchen, because there it was: the whole essay, handed to me by a man who cannot operate a needle. Home isn't only the place you crawl back to when life has gone spectacularly sideways. Sometimes it's the place you stop at for car keys and accidentally leave better dressed. I find this enormously funny and also, if I'm honest, a little bit magnificent.

They're all out there properly living, jobs, partners, opinions, the occasional questionable haircut. They need us less by the week, which is correct and as it should be, and also mildly heartbreaking in a way I'm not going to dwell on right now because I'll cry into this keyboard. But they still drift through. For the car. For the button. To sprawl on the grass with a friend I actually adore and will absolutely feed. For quiet, or company, or absolutely no reason at all.

What I think I actually want, and I say "think" because I reserve the right to change my perimenopausal mind hourly, is for coming home to never require an application form. No proving you deserve it. Because the missing button is easy. Life, eventually, will hand them something that isn't a missing button, and when it does, I do not want anyone standing outside my door doing mental arithmetic about whether they're allowed in.

I don't need the full story first. I don't need to approve of the story. We can get to the story. But first: bag down, something in your belly, a bed. The debrief can wait until morning, or possibly next Tuesday, or possibly forever if it's really that bad.

—

I haven't always been like this, for the record. Younger me, single-mother me, used to genuinely not invite people over because the sofa was wrong, or the walls were the wrong beige, or I'd convinced myself everyone else's home looked like a catalogue and mine looked like a crime scene involving IKEA. Deeply embarrassing in retrospect. I was measuring the completely wrong thing.

Because now, when I walk into someone's house, I don't checkout the furniture at all. I check my shoulders. Are they dropping? Can I breathe? Can I take my shoes off without asking? Am I already, four minutes in, wondering what's in their fridge? That last one is the real test, honestly. Fridge-curiosity is intimacy.

I've been in some gorgeous houses where I sat perfectly upright the entire time like I was at a job interview. And I've been in glorious wrecks of houses where I was horizontal on the carpet within the hour. The good ones are never about the décor. They're about whether someone can walk in without it becoming A Whole Thing.

So, apparently, all those years of buying cushions and rearranging chairs and cooking too much pasta? Not decorating. Loving people, badly disguised as interior design. Who knew.

Which is maybe why this whole downsizing conversation has thrown me slightly. I don't want to keep the house as some sort of shrine where nothing's allowed to change and the fridge is eternally stocked in case someone materialises. The kids are meant to leave, genuinely, I want them gone, building their own chaotic little lives and buying their own fabulous cushions. And I'd quite like my hubby and I to get to ask what we want too, for once, without other opinions in the room.

Maybe the next place has fewer bedrooms. Maybe someone ends up on the couch occasionally and just has to live with that. Maybe there's no secret quiet room at the top of the house for the next Maya-shaped crisis. Fine. Honestly, fine. Because I don't think I'm actually trying to rebuild this exact house somewhere else. I think I'm trying to figure out whether we can pack up the feeling of it and take that with us instead. The no-invitation-needed feeling. The pretending-isn't-required feeling. The turn-up-for-keys-leave-with-fixed-trousers feeling.

And, on the days it's bigger than a button-the door-still-opens feeling.

Letting them go and leaving the door open, it turns out, were never actually opposites. I just took all these years and one popped button to notice.

If you’re somewhere in this transition yourself, children leaving home, family roles shifting, or simply wondering who you are in the next chapter, this is also some of the work I explore with people through coaching. If you’d like to talk it through, find me here: www.thinking-it-through.eu