Herald reader Wilna White explains the misery of being in a home blighted by leaky home syndrome
KEY POINTS:
At least, I suppose I'm lonely, though since I'm that way by choice I can't really complain about it. So I thought I would try to write about it instead, about how finding yourself in possession of a leaky home can change you, can change your character.
At first there' s disbelief and anger. You see injustice everywhere you look: in your inspection notes, in your false CCC, in the polite but legal refusal of anyone involved in the building to come forward and take some responsibility. You refuse to believe that you can be made a victim of such falsehood and incompetence. You rage about it, your friends are indignant on your behalf, your neighbours are sympathetic and your lawyer expresses distaste.
Then you start realising that there are stone walls, everywhere.
You can' t go any further without legal intervention, expensive legal intervention, forced on you. You can't sell your house (and that includes when the nightmare scenario of double redundancy happens). You can't repair your house. You can't get people to do the right thing even though everyone you know agrees that natural justice should prevail.
And slowly it comes home to you that despite people's sympathy, their eyes glaze over when you start in on the latest developments and the problems you have.
Slowly but surely your horizons start shrinking.
You can't move away. You can't take a holiday. You close your eyes and clench your stomach when the car makes an unfamiliar noise.
And you begin to withdraw. Social structures, social intercourse, these things are based on the giving and receiving of hospitality, and you can't give it, so you must choose not to receive it. You can't give it because just as living in a leaky home brings you down, it brings your guests down; and since there are inevitably parts of your house you can't use, social occasions would be cramped to the point of discomfort, even if you could keep the curtains closed or the lights low. And it dominates the conversation; it can't be otherwise, because you're in it, surrounded by it, confronted by it at every turn. It begins to rule your life.
You withdraw from social gatherings where there is the slightest danger of someone inviting you to anything. You begin to stand apart and when you can't, you minimise your participation in the conversation.
Living in a leaky home forces you into all sorts of domestic contortions, and you structure your life to accommodate those. So pretty soon it becomes a blessing that you don't entertain.
Children are funny that way, they are much more forgiving and don't really question things. So you make sure your children have friends over, and you go through ever more complicated rituals to see to it that staying out of the dangerous bits becomes second nature for everyone who lives or visits in the place where you live, a place that has long since ceased to be a home.
You begin to feel like a stranger in those social settings that you can't avoid, like kids' end-of-year sports gatherings or school events. People talk and exchange the details of their everyday lives and you try to keep track, not realizing how far you've moved away from them. Someone will ask you how you've settled in and you look at them and think about what would happen if you told them the truth, and you say, "Oh, fine." instead.
You come to believe that the only people you can talk to are other leaky home owners. Without realizing it, you have reached a point where unconsciously you have accepted that you are part of a class; and with that acceptance comes the belief that you have done something to deserve it. You then realize that you probably can't bear to talk to other leaky home owners, because the weight of sadness might become too much to bear for both of you, and there are days when it's all you can do to cling to your dignity and keep standing, and not cry in public.
When you get to this point, you are alone. If you have also succumbed to depression by now, you can't be with crowds, especially happy crowds. You have to escape and be alone. The panic attacks begin, and if you can sleep through the night, you're among the lucky.
We generally can't have sleepovers; it is too dangerous for our children to use their bedrooms and they have to share the guest bedroom. But occasionally my son will have a friend over who likes to camp in the lounge in his sleeping bag. Then we quickly arrange a sleepover for my daughter, because my son's bed is free and it's just a quick linen change. This does mean that by 8.30 on a Saturday night we have to retire and the lounge effectively becomes the boys' bedroom. We accept this, as though we have deserved it; we accept that we do not deserve somewhere to sit and relax and enjoy the weekend. That is the mindset we have.
Flicking through channels one night last week, I saw a fleeting part of a program, which might have been a soap; I'm not familiar with it. It was evening and the mother was in the process of cooking and setting the table up for supper, for her family and for some friends who were arriving soon. I watched for a few minutes. It was like watching a spectator sport, like an activity I can only admire.
It made me think of the aerial acrobat at the circus we took the children to last winter. She had the same number of limbs as me, attached in the same order, but there is no way I could relate to the skill and ease of the beautiful and dangerous moves she made.
Yet we used to have friends around, and I used to cook for them, co-ordinate everything, talk happily about what was going on in our lives and theirs. I don't think I could do that now. It would frighten me.
A week or three ago, I was in one of those situations where I couldn't avoid conversation at a school evening, again. There were lots of people chatting; many of them clearly mutual friends, but just as many were making general conversation. It's usually easy enough to smile and nod my way through that, but in a sudden lull, someone said, "It's great that summers' nearly here. It's so good to be able to drag the barbie onto the deck and cook supper there once the summer evenings set in." For some reason she looked up at me and smiled expectantly, so a few other people looked at me too. It was as though someone had uttered a string of words in a language of which I only know the barest basics. I found myself unable to reply. I have no frame of reference to empathise with that experience. I was totally frozen.
Barbie? Deck? I wouldn't risk the life of a dog I didn't like on my deck.
Here's the challenge : explain all that, all the fear, the frustration, the futility, the fury; and still keep your friends happy and smiling.
I blamed it on my phone buzzing at the wrong time. I walked away from that one, sweating.
I am worried now, worried about whether I have the mental capacity to recover from this solitary mindset should the problems with our home ever be resolved. I sometimes think I don't possess the social skills I used to take for granted any more. And then I become worried about my children's future, and whether I can provide a normal social frame of reference for them.
I used to be able to hold conversations, not dodge them, or make sure I withdrew mentally from them, watching carefully for the slightest sign of curiosity that might make me betray the enormous gap between their lives and the peculiar existence that is ours.
I have changed. And I do not now think I have it in me to change back.
