A painful breakup - with our first family home.

We came as two and left as four. Who knew selling the house where our family was made would spark such grief?

I KNOW this is an incredibly privileged position to be complaining from so before I start, let me tell you I am well aware of the fact.

But that also doesn’t change the other fact that selling our first home and moving into a new one has been emotionally tough. We moved in yesterday, and the feeling right now is of grief.

We bought our old house seven years ago - a modest four-bed end-of-terrace with the railway track at the bottom of the garden. I was so proud to buy our first home together. And it was beautiful. Renovated to a high-spec a few years earlier, it had everything we ever wanted and I couldn’t believe our luck.

Two years later and there were three of us. We brought our first son home from hospital after his premature birth six weeks early. He’d spent two-and-a-half weeks in the premature baby unit and I still remember the anguish of leaving him in hospital night after night and my wife and I having to return home to our humble little house alone without him. It was much harder for Rhian, of course. What new mum envisions giving birth in hospital and going home without their child?

There were bleary-eyed 2am calls to his ward asking if he was ok. One time, the nurses called us. Panic set in. They thought there was something wrong with his hip. It turned out to be a false alarm.

The four walls of our bedroom had been the stage for so many memories and moments. Bedside cots, morning cuddles with the boys in bed with us, bedtime stories with us all huddled beneath the duvet. Those four wall had seen and heard a lot. I wonder what they thought of us?

Downstairs wasn’t much different. I could sit here all day and evoke memories of the boys racing around the kitchen on their scuttle bug trikes or having our favourite spag bol with tonnes of garlic bread on our very small but much appreciated glass dining table.

Some people used to wonder whether the railway track at the bottom of the garden was a nuisance. The truth is it ended up being a comfort. Dozing off in a half-sleep and hearing a train gliding past became somewhat of a warm embrace - like a newborn falling asleep to white noise. It was also very handy in the early hours when I’d wake up but not know what the time was. If I heard a train leaving the nearby station but it wasn’t yet light, I knew it was definitely at least 5.25am. I’d play internal ‘guess the time’ games in my head before finally picking up my phone to look. I had a lot of fun doing that - and was generally pretty accurate.

But the house I once loved and was so proud to call home ended up being not fit for purpose. Was it me that changed? Or the house? I guess like most I became accustomed to and ignored the great things the home provided us - and focused too much on what it wasn’t delivering. We were getting squeezed for space. The noise through the walls from next-door - particularly their dogs - was sometimes a bit much. But even so we became so close with our immediate neighbours that leaving them behind is now considered a big loss. They are good people, great kids, and I hope we keep our pledge to keep seeing each other.

I write this, embarrassingly with tears knocking on the door of my eyelids, the morning after moving into our new house. It’s massive. Five or six bedrooms, depending on if you count the downstairs office. A huge garden with enough space for trampoline, climbing frame and more. The bottom of our road leads directly onto the seafront. The beach is a few minutes away and we can hear the rolling waves from our window on a peaceful morning.

So what the bloody hell am I complaining about? I feel like I have betrayed my old home, which so kindly and unconditionally looked after us. It embraced our lows and elevated our highs. It cuddled and loved for our two boys, giving them safety and warmth. How could something so pivotal - giving love, care and warmth - be considered so redundant?

The heartache of leaving our old house behind is perhaps multi-layered. On introspection, maybe leaving our treasured home is the closure of a special chapter of life where we enjoyed the sweetest years of our sons’ lives.

I’m sure parenthood stays magical after kids reach five and upwards, but there is something heavenly about the newborn to toddler stage that feels like a gift from God. Pure innocence and wonder, where my son’s amazement at something so simple as the colours of a flower reminds me too that we are surrounded bye miracles.

Does the selling of our first family home, where we enjoyed those unfathomable moments, signal the end of that period? I think so. And that is where the heart breaks.

As with all broken hearts, time will be a healer. We will make new memories in this house that we treasure so dearly like the last. Just this time, the memories will be of school and college, and later waving them off to the workplace, university and finally their own homes. And when that happens and it’s time to eventually leave this now-strange house behind, I anticipate we’ll start the grieving process all over again.