In the meantime, I became the kind of person who slows down at the end of other people's driveways. I scrolled Facebook Marketplace like it was a part time job, scoping out the newish stuff people were desperate to get rid of. Free counts as a line item in my budget and I will not be taking questions on that.
The couch deserves its own paragraph, honestly. Curbside find, small stain I covered with a blanket I also did not technically own, having borrowed it from my mother under the loose understanding that I would "return it eventually." That couch held three kids and a tired mother through approximately one hundred episodes of whatever cartoon was on, and I will defend its honor forever, stain and all.
I furnished that entire first home for less money than most people spend on a single nice chair, and I am not telling you this as some kind of brag about frugality. I'm telling you because there is a very specific kind of pride that comes from looking around a space that is technically empty by most standards and feeling, for the first time in a long time, like it was entirely, completely mine. Nobody else's taste competing with it. Nobody else's rules about where the shoes go. Just me, my kids, a curbside couch, and a dresser held together by hope and the wrong screws.
There were nights I cried in that house, sitting on the floor because I didn't have enough chairs yet, eating cereal for dinner because cooking felt like one task too many. I'm not going to pretend starting over was some triumphant, Instagram worthy chapter. It was hard and ugly and occasionally hilarious in a way you can only really laugh about after the fact, like the time I realized I had no can opener and had to use a screwdriver and sheer force of will to open dinner.
But slowly, the garbage bags became drawers of folded clothes. The credit line balance shrank until it hit zero, right on schedule. The curbside couch eventually got replaced, though I kept it longer than I probably should have out of some strange loyalty. The house that started as an echoey, half furnished question mark became, somehow, home. Not because of what was in it, but because of who was in it, and the fact that every single piece of furniture in there, ugly or borrowed or assembled wrong, was a choice I got to make on my own.
If you are starting over right now, sitting on a couch you found somewhere questionable, eating cereal for dinner because that's all you have the energy for, I promise you this. It gets furnished eventually. Not just the house. You.
