When you're no longer the only adult living in your house

On moving in together

Drawings of me, by my daughter, on the wall above my desk

When I first became the only adult living in my house, my only real concern was making things ok for my daughter, then three. If she was ok, then I would be ok. That’s not a martyred brag at heroic motherhood. That’s just the fact of having a kid, or how I have found it to be anyway. If things are tricky for them, it fundamentally undermines your own peace of mind.

My mother commented at the time that it was good that my daughter wasn’t going to have to move, or change her home, that she was staying in the solid base I had already created. And I clung to this notion.

I also remembered my aunt, a single mother who would mind us in her house when we were little, and how cosy I had always found her home to be, and so that became a real focus, a cosy home.

I wanted my daughter to know, to feel really, that she had a solid, cosy home, no matter what had happened.

A few months in, we threw a breakfast party, for my mother, aunts, sister-in-law, cousins and one of my best friends and her children, the point half to bring new energy into the house, half to prove, to myself if nothing else, I could do this. Run a home good enough for a child to grow up in, by myself.

Us at our breakfast party

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This summer a friend and I were texting to arrange a meet up at my house with ourselves and kids.  She doesn’t live in this country, we barely see each other, we are both self-employed, neither of us had childcare that week. The odds were against us. My house was in an absolute jocker but as a person who ticks all the above boxes (and as someone with small kids, a woman who knows your house is never really tidy/clean in those years) I figured she would understand and decided not to let this stop us.

Shortly before they arrived I messaged: “Just don’t look at the floors. Who knows when they’ve last been cleaned.”

“I am the last person in the world who would judge you for your floors,” she texted back.

What a gem.

“True friendship is not judging each other’s squalor.” I replied.

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At a certain point late last year I realised I was doing a pre-clean before people visited our house. It wasn’t the classic pre-clean your you do before a cleaner arrives, a last-minute frantic effort to tidy enough that it is acceptable and not an actual insult to expect someone else to have to deal with your mess.

My pre-clean was for my daughter’s friends, nine-year-olds coming for a playdate. I think a measure of who is visiting our house is a good temperature test of how I’m managing the combination of work/parenting/having some kind of social life.  When I’m overwhelmed, it comes down to the basics, working, parenting, feeding.  Tidying goes kind of out the window. I stop inviting people over because I’m in keeping head above water mode (and it feels as if the house is too shambolic for all but the closest of people).

Last year I was overwhelmed, obvious from the fact that the main visitors were people under ten. The house became borderline feral at times, so before a child arrived I would an extremely surface level general tidy.

Obviously kids have different standards than adults when it comes to tidying, but that doesn’t mean they have no standards. They’re also far more likely to say out loud what an adult will silently think. And they can be goddamn judgmental little feckers (a friend was once asked where their balcony was).

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For the last few months, I’m no longer the only adult living in my house. Which means there is no hiding that you sometimes let things slide. No pre-cleaning, of either your house or yourself, to hide the worst of it.

You have to admit to your secrets, that sometimes when your daughter is elsewhere for dinner, you have a multi pack of Wispas with a chaser of Refreshers for dinner (they cannot look at you askew when you disclose this but must react as if this is a completely acceptable dinner. Which it is). 

When you’re sick for two weeks, and you reach the stewing in your bed too tired to shower or even brush your teeth stage, who knows when you last brushed your hair, and you’d like to go home to your mum except you’re a 45-year-old adult, and you’re so bored of yourself saying yeah still feel like shit, they see it all.

When you tell them you are moving in together, people who are married sometimes tell you you’re mad, that they would love to live separately from their spouse, maybe beside them as neighbours. I smile politely, and I always thinks of an interview John Clarke gave the Irish Times in 2021, speaking to Kathy Sheridan about his wife Marian Finucane, “my Marian, the woman I have loved for 40 years,” who died in 2020.

For both of them, it was a second marriage. In the interview, Clarke told Sheridan that ‘he doesn’t remember a raised voice, never mind a fight, in 40 years. “Maybe I’m suffering from amnesia, but I can’t remember one. Why would we?” he says. Sheridan describes herself giving him a sceptical gaze, to which he says, “see, we were both married before – and that puts manners on ya. American women say: ‘Always marry a married man’. It’s like two old mill wheels, they begin to smooth down a little, you know?  I think both of us would be peacemakers rather than warmakers…We disagreed on many things – how I parked the car would be a major one, or where my clothes lay on the floor as distinct from where hers lay on the floor – but I think we agreed far more often.”

The whole interview is drenched in his grief for his wife, you get the sense of a person who isn’t sure how to go on fashioning a life without Marian at the centre of it. It’s a beautiful read I’d highly recommend.

Sometimes when I’m interviewing women who are in a second big relationship, marriage or otherwise, I’ll mention it to them and they always know exactly what I mean. That appreciation of peace when maybe you have been through earlier big ruptures. The knowing what you have.

I interviewed the designer Helen Cody for last weekend’s Sunday Independent, and I told her about what John Clarke had said. Helen is married to Rory, both were previously married. She describe meeting when they were both on the ground, essentially starting again well into adult life, with baggage, and children, and careers to be rebuilt and wounds to be healed. She knew exactly what John Clarke meant about second big relationships.

Helen once told me something herself in a previous interview that I have also always remembered. She described her life as a triangle. She has been through a lot in her life. She lost her son Ethan. Her first marriage ended. Her business crashed in the recession.

Now, her life is small. She lives with her husband. She paints. Her days are spent between her studio, her home, and the park where she walks her dogs. She goes between the three points, the triangle around which her life was built. Small, but full of the most important, valuable things. The highlight of her day? Lighting the fire in the evening.

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None of this is to suggest that a second big relationship, one where you live together, is domestic bliss because everyone is high on being glass half full-ish. We had already argued about putting the bins out before we moved in together (we were drunk, it was a ridiculous argument).

And you’re up close with each other’s squalor, or whatever it is, no pre-cleaning, or the non-judgmental filter available to friends who visit for a few hours.

But also. When you’re no longer the only adult who lives in your house, fires are lit by someone else, there are lights on when you come home. You don’t always cook your own dinner. You’re not the only one creating the cosy.

A small life full of big things really. A cosy house to live in. The fact that today your cat walked nonchalantly past his dog, and nobody barked or hissed. The dinner made, the fire lit.