The Author of this Article Wishes to Remain Anonymous
I’m not typically a big crier, but Disney seems to have created a scientific formula to open my tear ducts remotely, so my surrounding family didn’t do much more than glance in my direction and give a slight eye roll at my expense as tears streamed down my face in the middle of the film.
They had no comprehension of the depth of feeling stirring within me. They didn’t know the fears and insecurities that had been bubbling quietly under the surface of my life for a long time were suddenly boiling over with a full body, life changing realisation.
It all looked perfect. Two point four children, suburban home, steady income, a beautiful Instagram feed of an idyllic life. But just like the Madrigal family in Encanto, if you scratched the surface you’d find endless fear, pain, fighting - my god, the fighting - worry, stress, lack of worth and no sense of self.
Our family had been built on inherited beliefs that we had assumed were facts, a religion we no longer believed in and a society that dictates the path we take (the one we all walk along with little, if any consideration as to whether we like the path, if we want to go where it leads, or heck - if we even know where it leads to).
As I watched the foundations of the Family Madrigal crumble, it suddenly became heart-stoppingly clear to me that my beautiful life had no foundations.
It was a house of cards.
One tiny knock, and the whole thing would come crumbling down. And the end felt so close. Every morning I woke up wondering if today was the day it would all fall apart.
So, being a logical kind of person, I did what anyone (ahem) would do when realising they were living in a home that had no foundations.
I knocked the whole damn thing down, before someone else did it for me.
What followed was a series of fast-paced, life changing decisions as I bulldozed the life I had created and exposed the hole underneath it. After several chaotic months I stood back and looked proudly at the black abyss at the foot of our life, “See! Here was the problem! No foundations! Let’s fix it!”
But, it transpires that life doesn’t quite work like that. Bulldozing your home isn’t the only way to fix flakey foundations. Apparently, other options are available. Underpinning, reconstruction, installing steels… I’m no builder but it turns out there are alternatives. And all, in hindsight, much safer approaches when you desperately want to sustain and solidify the beautiful life you created, rather than destroy it.
The consequences, of course, were enormous. And devastating. I hadn’t considered any possible outcome aside from my family looking at the empty hole I had exposed and saying “Wow!! We had no idea! How wonderful you are to have exposed this to us all. How joyous it will be to start from scratch and rebuild every bastard thing we had already created.”
The thing with the bulldozer approach that I tend to default to across every aspect of my life, is that it leaves a bloody mess. The work needed doing. We would not have been able to continue as we were. A house can’t stand without foundations, and neither can a family, finances, a marriage or indeed an individual…but foundations can’t be exposed without leaving a mucky hole.
And so, before rebuilding the house of our life that I thought would start years ago when I exposed the lack of foundations - I’ve instead been picking up the pieces, clearing up the mess, and letting the dust settle to see what it is we need to rebuild.
It’s worth it.
The pieces of ourselves that we are pulling together to pour into our foundations for when we are ready to rebuild are strong. They’re thought-filled, they’re considered, they’re joyous, ambitious. They have the right things at the core:
Togetherness. Connection. Family. Communication. Freedom. Compromise.
AND, the cost has been great.
But the house of cards has fallen and I believe the life built on these foundations will be strong enough to withstand any storm. The magic that glistens will be real.
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02: Foundations
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