2024.

What a year it has been so far. We are a little over half way now, and I feel as though I’ve lived 3 years in the space of one.

The electric slide…

The end of last year put a few stresses on us, all at once, which forced us to reconsider how we were coping.
Tom’s work had to redo their EBA agreement, and every time this happens, it means months of striking. It means months of barely any work. Half shifts, tools down, and not much pay. Being part of the union is pretty non-negotiable and therefore he HAS to be a part of the protected action against the company. It’s always a tough time, but with a young family, it was almost cruel. This time it happened in the months leading up to Christmas/New Years and continued on until February. On top of this stress, he had to still be AVAILABLE to work, even though there was no work.
Meanwhile as everyone knows, the cost of living sky rocketed, our mortgage repayments basically doubled, everything everywhere all went up all at once. On top of this, my partner developed a hernia, which meant any sort of physical exercise, lifting, playing with the kids, work etc was very painful. He needed surgery, and up to a month off completely to recover.

With this perfect storm swirling, on new year’s day, after spending the day with our families and relaxing, we finally sat down on the couch after putting the kids to bed, looked at each other and said, “We can’t afford this anymore”. We had been slowly slipping since having children, but the last 3-4 months had been a haemorrhage. We thought we would have to sell and move. I immediately got on the phone to my mum and told her of our situation. She already knew it was hard for us, but she didn’t realise it was no longer an option to stay. So she graciously offered us her house to live in for a year, so we could rent out our family home to cover the mortgage for a while. Mum had just settled on her holiday house and was more than happy to spend the year there settling in and making it their own. We would have our space and she would have hers.

To the left to the left, everything you own in a box to the left…

It was a hard time for our family, with the speed of light we had a real estate agent, our family home on the rental market, and we started packing up our life. We had 2 weeks to get all of our heavy furniture downstairs to store, junk to sort out from 5 years of having kids, juggling packing and moving what we could, with what we still needed, and what was going to stay. Cleaning and scrubbing, carpet steam cleaning, skips to fill, the yard to sort out, and all with 3 kids in tow on the summer holidays and Harry Hernia getting bigger by the day.

Before we knew it though, we were in mum’s house, and tenants were moving in. With no time to really grieve our reality or to even settle in…school and kindy were starting and we began the new routine of driving the kids 50 minutes each way, every day. The time spent in the car added up very quickly, and the kids were over it before it had even begun. It was a lot for them – to pack up all their belongings and move house right before another massive transition in their lives, but they handled it so well. They’ve been absolutely amazing little adapters and despite still missing their home, they’ve taken it all in their stride.

I get knocked down, but I get up again…

6 months in, we have not really saved money, but we have absolutely put the lid on what would have otherwise been an even more stressful 6 months. My car completely broke down with a number of issues, the biggest was needing a new gearbox. Tom had his hernia surgery and recovered really well. His work finalised the EBA agreement and all shifts returned to normal. I trained my butt off for Hyrox to keep my mind off everything and settled into an exhausting but busy routine and the calendar ticked over quickly. However we also had a number of expenses come up with the house – apart from the costly compliance checks, we had a massive amount of expenses for the house. The oven broke the day we moved out, then the 5 yo dishwasher broke two months later – both needed to be replaced. On top of that we had to pay maintenance requests for arbitrary jobs like one or two down lights turning off when they had been left on too long, or a leaky tap that just needed its fitting screwed on tighter. Those were getting more ridiculous by the day. Just as we were deciding we’d had enough of this, we received notice that the tenants were out of work and were breaking their lease half way through the term.

To say Tom was excited was an understatement. He’d been missing home like crazy and was starting to get worried about our family home being properly looked after. Among all of the maintenance, we had an update from an inspection that the tenants had built a new shed and a deck without permission, and had two cats and a rabbit that hadn’t been declared.
We were both eager to be home.

I had my hesitations though – what if we got stuck in the same position as before? What if Tom’s work went quiet again and we couldn’t afford the mortgage? But I realised we would ALWAYS be living by ‘what ifs’, no matter what.
So we formulated a plan. My youngest had turned 14 months, and was old enough now that I could start looking for some work. With a bit of planning I can get some shifts in disability support, and work from home doing data annotation, and some freelance graphic design on the side. With any luck, I can make enough to help the financial load. It will be a juggle, but I’m excited to take on the challenge. I’ve been wanting to return to work for a number of years, but it’s never been feasible with all the kids under school age and no adequate childcare options available to us.

So our sideways step, despite not being the money maker we thought it would be, has helped in more ways than we could ever have planned for. We are so eternally grateful to my mum for having us live in the family home so we could survive this storm. We are packing up and moving back in 2 weeks, and cannot be more happy about it. Our future is uncertain, times are tough for all of us, but we will try our best.
A friend mentioned to me recently that this is the hardest time we will face. We have a kid in each ‘stage’ of life – one in primary school, one in kindergarten and one home full time. We are torn in so many directions, just juggling the day to day is big enough. To throw in a work schedule and moving again is hard, but we can do hard things. We will practice our resilience and hopefully teach our kids a few life lessons along the way.