New Chapters ◦ Chapter Three: The Return ◦ Entry 5
This essay is part of my New Chapters series — a collection of personal essays organized into themed chapters that trace different seasons of rebuilding and becoming.
July and August had been a whirlwind.
In the early days of July, buying a house was still something I was trying to figure out whether I could even do. A week in, I applied for a USDA Direct home loan, got approved much faster than I expected, and suddenly... the thing I had been working toward for years became real.
We went into house-hunting mode almost immediately. I studied listings and property taxes. We drove through towns in five counties. We walked through houses and imagined our furniture in them. I made offers. I lost houses I had already started picturing as ours. And every time, we regrouped and kept looking. Somewhere in those crazy few weeks, "maybe someday" had turned into we are actually doing this. We just needed to find the house first.
By the last week of August, the boys and I were still looking. I was worn down. I was growing discouraged. It felt like we'd never find our home. Then, on a Wednesday night in LeRoy, we walked through another house. This one felt different. It felt immediately familiar.
By the next day, Thursday, August 27, we had made an offer, and the whirlwind of the previous two months had suddenly narrowed to one thing: waiting to find out whether this house was going to be ours.
Finally, the listing agent contacted my realtor Mike in the afternoon with an update of sorts. At first, there was a concern about my USDA home loan. She had dealt with USDA financing before and had concerns about their tough inspection process. Mike went to bat for us. He explained the process, told her about his colleagues and their recent successes with USDA, and answered her questions. And then we waited some more.
For a little while, I thought that was the thing standing between me and the house.
But then the concern changed. The realtor called Mike again that evening and explained that the house was part of an estate. One of the daughters was the executor. It had belonged to their mother for decades, and she had raised six children there. The family was having a hard time letting it go.
There was nothing I could do about that.
I understood it, which somehow made the waiting worse. Somewhere, a family was deciding whether they were ready to say goodbye to a house that had held decades of their life. And on the other side of that decision, I was desperately hoping they would let it hold the next part of mine.
They told us we would have an answer by noon Friday.
So I waited. All day Thursday. All Thursday night. I worried about the financing. I worried that the family would decide they weren’t ready. I worried that I had let myself want this one too much.
Then Friday morning, I went to work and acted completely normal. I answered emails. I did whatever was sitting on my desk. I set up a meeting. Then I went to the meeting and sat there like a person whose stomach was not churning while somewhere else, people I had never met were deciding whether I was about to buy a house.
I knew we were supposed to hear by noon. I was aware of every passing minute.
Then my phone lit up.
Mike.
Pls call me when free - good news.
I looked at those words and knew. I excused myself from the meeting and walked out. I called Mike.
They had accepted my offer.
I got the house.
And then, somehow, I had to go back to work.
Later that afternoon, I sat through two hours of training on travel reports. Someone was explaining mileage and reimbursements and forms I was presumably supposed to be learning how to complete, while my mind kept wandering somewhere else.
The kitchen. The bedrooms upstairs. The backyard. The deck.
We got it.
Then I would drag my attention back to travel reports. A few minutes later, my mind was there again.
It has been a couple of weeks now, and everything still feels surreal.
Most of the time, my life looks exactly the same as it did before. I wake up in the same room. I drive to the same job. I come home to my parents’ house. I order groceries. I spend time with the boys. I go to bed. Nothing around me has changed yet.
And then, in the middle of some completely ordinary part of my day, the house pops into my head: Oh! I bought a house.
It feels almost like remembering something I had temporarily forgotten, and every single time, I feel this little burst of happiness inside.
We have a house. That house is ours.
I keep looking at the pictures. I have seen them so many times that I practically have the listing memorized, but I still pull them up. Except now I am not studying them the way I did when I was house hunting. I am not trying to decide whether I like the kitchen or whether the bedrooms are big enough or whether I can picture us living there.
I already know the answer.
Now I look at them and think, That’s ours.
That kitchen is ours. Those stairs are ours. Those bedrooms are going to belong to my boys.
I have started mocking up rooms, changing flooring and furniture and paint colors on my phone just to see what everything might look like. I have looked at dining room tables and couches and sideboards. I have thought about where the television should go and what furniture will fit in which room. I have mentally pulled up carpet I do not yet own. I am decorating a house I cannot currently enter, which is a very strange way to live.
And then there are the things that are considerably less exciting than furniture.
A few days after we got the news, I made a checklist of everything I am going to need when we move. I am starting almost completely from scratch, and it turns out a functioning household requires an alarming number of things. Plates. Towels. Scissors. Cleaning supplies. An air fryer. Trash cans. Shower curtains. All the tiny things that exist quietly in a home until you suddenly realize you do not own any of them.
I decided I would start buying a few things every week rather than trying to buy an entire household at once.
The first week of September, I placed a Walmart order. Just a regular Walmart order. Nothing exciting. Before I checked out, I looked at my house checklist and added three things: Paper towels. Ziploc bags. Aluminum foil.
That was it.
The first three things I bought for home.
Not a couch. Not a dining room table. Not even a plate. Paper towels, Ziploc bags, and foil.
And somehow, even that made me happy.
Because they aren’t for where I live now. They’re for my house. For my kitchen. For cupboards I cannot open yet and a life we are waiting to move into.
I keep having moments like that lately, when the enormity of what is happening sneaks into something completely ordinary.
Maybe that is why it all still feels so surreal.
For years, buying a house was something that belonged to a future version of my life. First I needed to get through the divorce. I needed to figure out where we were going to live in the immediate future. I needed to find steady ground again. I needed to pay off debt. I needed to save money. I needed to rebuild my credit. I needed a job that could support us. I needed to get approved for a mortgage. I needed to find a house I could actually afford.
There was always another thing between me and home.
And now that I am almost there, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. It is going to be hard financially. I know that. There will be months when the mortgage and the utilities and groceries and whatever old-house surprise has decided to introduce itself make me wonder what on earth I was thinking.
I know what it means to do this on one income. I know I am taking on something enormous.
I am scared.
And I did it anyway.
Not because I stopped being afraid, but because somewhere along the way, I became capable of doing the thing that scared me.
Soon, my boys are going to live in a house their mother bought for the three of us. I can barely type that sentence without crying.
Their bedrooms. Their backyard. Their stairs. Their home.
A home I bought.
But that life is still just ahead of us. Right now, I am still here. In between. Looking at pictures. Mocking up rooms. Searching for furniture. Buying paper towels. Slowly gathering the pieces of a life we are preparing to move into.
Maybe it is because I am standing so close to the beginning of that life that I can finally see the last few years a little differently.
For three years, I have called all of this rebuilding.
Rebuilding my finances. Rebuilding my career. Rebuilding our routines. Rebuilding my life after the one I thought I was going to have ended.
But lately, I have started to wonder if I have been using the wrong word.
Because rebuilding suggests putting something back together. Restoring what was there before.
And that isn’t what I have done.
I am not recreating my old life. This house will not look like the house we lived in before. Our family will not look the way it did before. There will not be another adult income helping with the mortgage or another person responsible when something breaks.
The more I look at the life in front of me, the less it resembles anything I had before.
For three years, I thought I was rebuilding the life I had lost.
I wasn’t.
Turns out, I was building something new.
Visit the New Chapters landing page to explore each chapter and read the story in order.
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