I sometimes refer to myself as a travelling salesman. I travel enough. And in the end, consulting is about selling your expertise to organizations that have found that they need it. Now, many consultants would disagree with me about the selling part – and I have to admit that I understand where they’re coming from. I’m one of those types of consultants who doesn’t actively sell my services. I figure if you need me, you’ve got my number.
But regardless, I’m travelling a lot. Most of the times, I try to keep it to an overnight. I generally don’t mind how late I get home, just as long as I get home to my own bed at the end of the night. Now, it’s not that the bed is so amazing. It’s comfortable enough. And I do find it a bit difficult to sleep on my own. (Which is actually ironic as I initially found it difficult to sleep with someone else in the bed). No, it’s that home is my safe space. But even more than that, it’s my soft place to land.
That was important to both of us. We needed home to be a stress-free place. With both of us having high-stress jobs – and mine used to be even worse – there are plenty of days when you feel like a failure, or that everyone is angry with you or that you’re angry with everyone else. But, the big thing is life is not sustainable like that. I guess it could be, but I imagine that those who choose to live that way are often angry and frustrated most of the time. So, a correction: MY life was not sustainable like that.
Thus, the whole concept of creating a “soft place to land” for both of us was born. It actually originated from my sister. We were talking one day and the conversation got into the stress people bring into their lives. She talked about how she always attempted to create a shelter at home for both herself and her husband. A place where there was no yelling, no drama, no tension… essentially a safe place.
That conversation happened around the time my husband and I had gotten engaged and were moving in together. Our house had so many renovations to be done, we were selling my house, planning a wedding and doing our wills and financial planning (which is a task only people who are old when they first get married think to do). It could have become a stressful time. Combining each person’s belongings into one space can in and of itself get stressful. Who gets the good closet space? Which furniture pieces do you keep? Do we really need to have three bicycles in the living room? How much space did I really want in the basement? Where was all of this stuff going to go?
But creating a soft spot to land meant something to me. My husband had some frustrations with the house – even though it was his. There was some delayed maintenance and some parts of the house that didn’t function well. And even in the beginning when he had purchased it, it had not been his dream home. It was “good enough” at the time and that feeling had been fading fast.
Plus, we ended up moving in together more quickly than we had intended. Although we were older and not for any particular religious reason, we had wanted to wait until we were married before living together. It would be more of a line of a demarcation. Prior to being a family, we had planned on living separately. Once we became a family, we had planned to live together. Fortunately for us, it didn’t work out that way. A friend of a friend – who eventually became a friend herself – was looking for a house. Would I show her mine? She wanted a small house that was move-in ready and there wasn’t much housing stock available. Thus, a sunny day in September – nearly nine months before our wedding – we packed up my belongings, paid some high school “brawn” to move the furniture and drove the twenty minutes across town to move in together.
Moving in early had its bonuses. We obviously saved money on the sale of my house and got the purchase price we were looking for. But, we also got that opportunity to be together and to test out this theory we had about becoming a family.
But there were drawbacks as well. The biggest, of course, was that the house still needed a little love. It didn’t feel like a home. Along with the bicycles in the unused livingroom, there was rigid foam insulation that was intended to help improve the insulation in the basement. There was that baby blue kitchen – who could forget that? – and then the walls which needed painting, carpets that needed tearing up, and wallpaper that needed to come down. Most importantly, there was the heating system that needed replaced. We weren’t ready to install the geothermal back then and we were both a bit wary of the oil stove. That first winter we heated the house with a wood stove and sparingly used the oil furnace. Sixty-two degrees was the average temperature in the house. Sixty-six felt downright balmy.
But a home isn’t something you pick out from House Beautiful magazine. Instead, it’s truly where you live and love. So, while making home a soft place to land did include adding a few more accoutrements, it was more about creating a feeling of relaxation and escape. Home needed to be calm, welcoming, and if not physically warm, emotionally warm.
So, that was my first task. The walls got painted – some right away, some over time. In that first year, I also took down two rooms’ worth of wallpaper, allowing us to finally use our master bedroom. But then, the goal was to make it feel calm and inviting. Paint could make the setting more attractive, but making it feel calm and inviting was about us.
I think having that perspective of creating a soft spot helped us learn to live together, to be honest. It became important that when we disagreed on a particular issue, we didn’t become disagreeable. It was okay to debate; it wasn’t really okay to argue. I remember consciously making myself repeat back what my husband-to-be had just said and what he was trying to communicate with me. Experts tell you to do that and it is really helpful. Maybe I felt that not getting the insulation from the livngroom to the basement in a timely manner was his was of indicating he just wasn’t ready for me to move in yet. He felt that putting one more thing into an already cluttered basement was just going to create more chaos. He hadn’t meant to hurt my feelings but he had to clear a “semi-permanent” spot in the basement before the insulation could be moved.
We found that being fair to each other and really trying to understand the others’ perspective made difficult decisions easier. You don’t get to 44 and 46 without having a number of failed relationships and bad experiences in your past. As we both learned that as partners, we would not twist the other’s words in the heat of battle, we trusted we would be heard. And when you trust you will be heard, it’s easier to not be so adamant, so fearful or so angry. And when no one gets angry, no one has to fear tension when they walk in the back door. And when you can walk in the door without even a twinge of foreboding, home becomes a soft place to land.
While I deeply appreciated that we had created such a warm and welcoming environment, not just for ourselves but for anyone who visited, I wouldn’t really come to know the true value of it until I became a travelling salesman. Genuinely, I’m not sure I could do what it is that I do without having home be so safe for me. I’m still in board rooms having difficult conversations, but I’m now the consultant and not the CEO. The loss of decision-making authority makes some of those conversations a little harder to have. I have to be a little more careful reading the room and a little more cautious about what I say. I no longer have to live with the consequences of the decision that gets made and while it may seem that it may make you more free to speak, it’s actually more constraining. Knowing that someone else will deal with the fallout, makes me more diligent about getting it right and choosing the right words to deliver the message.
And then I get to go home. Whether it’s a six-hour drive through the rural countryside, a 45-minute trek out of stop-and-go congestion or hopping the last flight back to the airport nearest me, I get to go home at the end of my journey. Home to a house that is slowly being renovated into its own version of House Beautiful. That doesn’t matter so much to me. Instead, I get to go home to the love of my life, the sweet kitty he adopted, our back deck that still desperately needs to be replaced, garter snakes in the yard that I hate, and a sense of welcome and belonging that makes me feel safe, warm and content.
Home is indeed that very soft spot to land.
The Yuppie Homesteader 