“Housebound” by Linda Campbell

Foundation

I’m not sure that I ever really wanted to be a mother, but I was raised to believe I did. I knew that my husband wanted children eventually, so, at 38, I suggested we start trying. I wanted to make sure we didn’t wait until it was too late. After a year without success, we visited a fertility clinic. Before we left, they performed a pregnancy test, apparently a standard procedure. I peed on a stick and — to our amazement — I was pregnant. The next day, I bought a baby card for my husband to commemorate the occasion. But the day after that, I had one of my random heavy periods. I learned the term “spontaneous abortion,” one that explained the handful of unusually gushy cycles I’d experienced that year. Fertility consulting then ensued, and we discovered that I had a low egg follicle count, which precluded any treatment involving hyper-ovulation stimulants like drug therapy or IVF. Still, they didn’t see any reason that I couldn’t get pregnant naturally. But I suspected the few eggs I had just weren’t viable. We abandoned the plan for children. My husband seemed unfazed. At 32, perhaps he wasn’t ready to be a father and part of me felt relieved. I wasn’t ready either and we didn’t talk about it again. Instead, he convinced me to build a house together.

Construction

The house was his dream, not mine, and initially I resisted the plan. I half-joked that such an expensive anchor would keep us forever in Ottawa. I wanted to move abroad, to ask for expat assignments, which would be easier with a smaller turnkey house, but he didn’t think this a good career move for himself. So, we stayed and the building began.

He acted as general contractor, overseeing the project and doing some of the work himself. It took three years. My role, to make it beautiful, was a responsibility that weighed heavily on me. I loved the house, but it was so much more than I ever imagined for myself. I had to get it right. When complete, it was a sprawling 5000 square foot timber frame on the Rideau River.  We called it Mystery Hill and it was a house worthy of a name. Sometimes I couldn’t believe that it was ours – it was gorgeous – and at the same time I was uncomfortable with the scale and price of it.

We were aunt and uncle to four nieces and two nephews and I kept them in mind as I made decisions about the house. One of the guest rooms had twin beds because our nieces and nephews came in pairs. The toy box, built into the window seat that spanned the alcove next to the great room, was filled with toys passed along from friends and relatives. Every kid who ever visited made a beeline to that drawer upon arrival. Our rec room sported an air hockey table, a Sony PlayStation, and a movie projector. The kids learned how to swim in our pool, tube behind our boat, and steer our mini tractor, the Kubota, from my husband’s lap.

We hosted Christmas every year, combining families, easily seating twenty at our dining table. We held lively loud dinner parties for our friends. We did a lot of kitchen dancing. We laughed a lot. We worked too hard, especially him, and we each traveled a lot for our jobs. We didn’t fight very often. We didn’t make love enough.

Deconstruction

He was promoted to a senior VP when our small company was acquired by a much larger one. His team grew from 250 to 2500 while my role remained the same. He loved his work while I no longer cared for mine.  He started flying around on the corporate jet, working from Waterloo instead of Ottawa, and spending time with people I didn’t know, people who had a lot of money. My unfashionable husband suddenly took an interest in the clothes he wore. He wanted to buy a Porsche (in addition to his BMW and my VW Golf) and pave the laneway with slate cobblestones. I said no to both.  Meanwhile I too was working hard, traveling (in economy class), and trying to maintain some semblance of our normal life when he came home on weekends. At 46, going through early perimenopause (thanks to my low egg count), the constant night sweats and hot flashes took their toll on me.  I felt hideous. 

On that last day, the day my world imploded, we hosted brunch for family and friends. Mother’s Day. My husband had been disengaged and grumpy for most of the weekend. I assumed his stress was related to a product launch that had him working seven days a week. So, when he behaved less than genially, I let it go. After everyone left, I cleaned up the remnants of the party by myself.

Later I found him sitting in a chair by the dock, gazing out at the river. I sat in the chair next to him and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You can quit, you know… if work is too much.” He looked at me like I was an imbecile.

“It’s not work.” He turned away, “Never mind.”

We spent the rest of the day apart, which is easy to do in a house that size. After supper, I went into our room to prepare for a business trip the next morning. He came in, lay on our bed watching as I packed, his unhappiness palpable in the smothering silence of the room. Perhaps in that moment, that millisecond just before he spoke, I knew something brutal was coming. He started to cry, then blurted quickly, as if the words burned his tongue, “I don’t love you that way anymore.”

Dumbstruck, I tried to meet his eyes that looked at the ceiling instead of at me. He lay on his back, arms crossed behind his head, weeping openly, his face red and wet. My mind grappled to comprehend. The space behind my face tightened. My voice finally broke free from where it had been stuck somewhere between my stomach and throat. Words rushed out in a disjointed plaintive plea of shock and grief, “No. You can’t. Don’t. I love you. Is there someone else? What’s wrong? What did I do? Don’t. I love you.” And finally, “What about the house?”

“I don’t care about the house. I don’t want this life anymore. With you.” No other woman. He just didn’t love me that way anymore. We both cried, though my crying was punctuated by bouts of inarticulate begging. I felt everything cracking, not just my heart, but my world, every element of which was intricately interwoven with his – our family, friends, work. The house.

Eventually we went to bed and he held me while I whimpered. I left the next morning for my trip. We texted all week, taking turns consoling each other, because we were alone but still together in this – the end of our marriage. When I got home he was gone.

I kept to myself, only leaving to go to work and to yoga, where I cried silently in the dark during savasana. I shuffled around the house, living in only a fraction of it, his absence a presence that followed me from room to room. Since neither of us knew whether his spontaneous decision was permanent, we didn’t tell anyone. He temporarily moved to Waterloo and everyone simply accepted our story that work kept him there. I murmured in response to the utterances of sympathy and averted my eyes when mutual colleagues expressed gratitude at the sacrifices we were making for the company. I maintained the charade, desperately hoping for reconciliation whereas he did so to avoid confessing the truth to friends, family and coworkers.

After six weeks, when we finally agreed to tell people, everyone asked the same thing. “What about the house?”

I wanted to scream, “Can’t you see I’m dying inside? Fuck the house!”

Shelter

Alone, I stayed in the house that I think suffered with me, or at least from my care. I did my best to look after it. I tried, but never mastered the pool’s chlorine balance; it turned green. At times, a smoke alarm would go off and I would spend ages walking through the rooms, trying to identify the source of the intermittent chirps. The screens in our sun porch kept falling out and our indoor cats would gleefully escape, leading to a frantic chase down the laneway. I cleared the property after a mini tornado tore through, knocking down branches and bringing down trees, one landing across our pool shed and crushing the roof. I organized a carpenter to repair it. I learned how to drive the Kubota, mowing the lawn and hauling the garbage down the lane to the edge of the road.

I didn’t eat. I drank. I cried a lot.

I looked after the house, willing him to return, hoping that if I took good enough care of it, he would find a way to love me again. After three months, I realized the futility of this idea. I knew I had to get out; the house was an unbearable reminder of a life that wasn’t mine anymore. He wasn’t coming back. I started spending my empty weekends despondently poring over real estate listings. In addition to my grief, I felt shame, the shame of being left. I worried I would forever be defined by the end of my marriage and the loss of the house that had outlasted the love that built it.

Reconstruction

A friend had recently relocated to California and, based on that single data point, I decided to do the same.  I requested a transfer; the company obliged. So I moved 2500 miles from home, by myself, to another country.

In June, thirteen months after that traumatic Mother’s Day, I departed the house for the last time, after being its solitary caretaker for more than a year. The night before leaving, I walked around the house. It wasn’t the same. I thought it looked bare, stripped of its soul. That night, I didn’t cry.  The next morning, I got into a friend’s car and headed to the airport. I didn’t look back.

Home

Now I rent an apartment. I still host parties – I don’t need a big house to do so. People congregate in the kitchen and eat perched where they can, plates on their laps. Sometimes there’s kitchen dancing. It has a beautiful view of the city and, when anything goes wrong, I call my landlord.

He still owns the house, but he moved to California a year after I did, and only uses Mystery Hill as a vacation home. He’s married to someone else. They have three children and three houses together. I sometimes wonder how she feels about it; the house that has me stamped all over it, in each fixture, faucet, light switch, and tile. The drywall returns on the windows. The toy box. Or perhaps I’ve been eradicated. Maybe they’ve redecorated.

I still can’t explain what happened, but in my new life no one asks. Maybe he left because he outgrew me, because I wasn’t good at having so much money, or because a biological imperative to reproduce snuck up on him. Maybe he did have a lover or maybe he was just tempted. But none of this matters, I don’t love him that way anymore. I have come to believe he did me a favor, that I was stuck living someone else’s life, sacrificing my dreams for his. He left. And I was left to build a new life, the one I picked for myself.

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