I started my new job at the beginning of December 2024.
One of the things I had looked forward to most about leaving my previous job was simply having more of my life back.
For the past eighteen months, work had consumed an enormous amount of my time and energy. The relationship had inevitably been neglected, but so had our home. My son and his girlfriend were always very good at cleaning up after themselves, so the house was never a disaster, but I hadn’t done any proper deep cleaning for well over a year. There were cupboards I wanted to sort, rooms I wanted to reorganise and all those little jobs I had been mentally adding to a list while telling myself I would get around to them when life finally became less demanding.
Now, theoretically, I could.
Except that for the first few weeks, I didn’t.
I was actually rather lazy.
Looking back, I think I was recalibrating after eighteen months of constantly pushing myself. I had become so accustomed to being busy, tired and under pressure that when the pressure suddenly disappeared, I didn’t immediately fill the space with productivity. I seemed to need some time simply to exist in it.
There was another reason too.
My son and his girlfriend were still living with us, and now that we were all sharing the house again, there seemed slightly less incentive to start making radical changes to it. I still had ideas about what I wanted to do eventually, but for the moment there was no urgency.
For once, things could wait.
The most important thing was that my new job was wonderful almost from the moment I started.
My new employers were completely different from the ones I had just left. The atmosphere was different. The expectations were different. I didn’t feel as though I was constantly bracing myself or trying to anticipate the next problem.
Very quickly, I had the feeling that I could be happy there.
It was quite strange suddenly having mental space again.
I even found myself with little pockets of idle time after a working day, something I hadn’t experienced for what felt like forever. On a whim, I downloaded a silly little game onto my phone. It wasn’t anything significant. Whenever I was bored or had fifteen minutes, I would open it and play for a while.
At the time, it was simply a way of filling time.
Meanwhile, something interesting was beginning to happen with my son.
He and a plasterer friend were building a business together, although what they were doing was rather more specialised than ordinary plastering. They were working with high-end microcement and decorative finishes.
I had actually started noticing these finishes through my own work in private households. In some of the more expensive homes, traditional painted or wallpapered walls were increasingly being replaced by highly polished surfaces that looked almost like stone, or softer textured finishes reminiscent of the walls you might see in Morocco.
My son and his friend were becoming very good at it.
They were also beginning to attract some extremely wealthy and prestigious clients.
Then, shortly before Christmas, my son did something that meant far more to me than he probably realised.
He asked Stephen whether he would like to go with them on one of their jobs.
It was significant because my son’s opinion of Stephen had not always been particularly high. There had been times when he had seen me supporting Stephen while Stephen seemed to be making very little progress himself. But recently that had begun to change. Stephen had been working, becoming more productive and appearing to get his life back on track.
My son had noticed.
His willingness to take Stephen onto one of his own jobs felt like tangible evidence that some of his faith in him had been restored.
I knew my son well enough to know that he wouldn’t have made the offer casually. He was building a business and developing a reputation. Taking somebody onto a job meant trusting them to work hard, behave appropriately and represent that business well.
I was delighted.
Immediately, my mind began running ahead.
If Stephen impressed them, perhaps there was a possibility that my son and his friend might start using him more regularly. Maybe, eventually, he could become part of what they were building.
It seemed like another door opening.
So Stephen left with them that first morning.
When he came home that evening, however, the story he had to tell me was even better than anything I had imagined.
While working at the property, Stephen had got talking to the male principal of the household. During their conversation, Stephen mentioned that he had previously worked as a groundskeeper for my former employers.
By coincidence, the man knew them.
That immediately gave Stephen some credibility, but the conversation then took an unexpected turn.
The household was looking for a gardener and groundskeeper.
Would Stephen be interested?
He absolutely would.
Suddenly, what had begun as a single day’s work with my son had turned into the possibility of a completely new job.
And the more we heard about it, the better it sounded.
The salary would be around £30,000 a year. The work would involve gardening and groundskeeping, some general maintenance around the property and walking the dogs — all things Stephen was perfectly capable of doing and, more importantly, things he could actually enjoy.
There was also accommodation.
A small flat on the estate came with the job.
To us, it sounded incredible.
Financially, it changed the picture almost immediately. One of the uncertainties surrounding my decision to leave my previous job had been giving up the salary that had allowed me to save so much money. But if Stephen was earning £30,000 a year alongside my new income, that concern almost disappeared.
Together, we could still earn well.
Together, we could still save.
And the job seemed useful in another way too.
For some time, we had talked about the possibility of eventually applying for a couple’s position in a private household, perhaps in Scotland. I now had years of experience running homes and managing staff. Stephen had been gradually building a collection of practical skills of his own — gardening, groundskeeping, maintenance and working with his hands.
This job would add another substantial piece to that picture.
It made the idea of us one day applying together seem less like something we merely talked about and more like something we might genuinely be able to do.
We were both enormously excited.
Then there was the flat.
Initially, I wasn’t certain that I would live there with him.
There were still things I wanted to do at home, and my son and his girlfriend were still living there. Stephen, on the other hand, hadn’t particularly enjoyed sharing the house with them.
More importantly, things between Stephen and me had felt a little unstable over the previous six months.
We hadn’t separated, and I wasn’t thinking about ending the relationship, but something had shifted. I had spent much of that period believing the strain came from the enormous pressure of my job and the effect it had had on us. Now that I had changed jobs, I wanted to see what happened when life became easier again.
Perhaps a little space wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Stephen could live in the flat during the week while I remained at home. We could spend time together without immediately throwing ourselves into another major change.
It seemed sensible.
At some point just before or just after Christmas — I can’t remember exactly when — we went to the property together and met the female principal to discuss the arrangements properly.
We were shown the flat.
And that changed something.
It was much nicer than I had imagined.
As I walked around it, I began to picture us there.
There would be no children living with us. No girlfriend. No navigating somebody else’s routines or trying to find privacy inside a shared family home.
Just Stephen and me.
In all the years we had been together, we had never actually moved into a new home as a couple. Stephen had moved into my house, into a life and household that already existed. This would be different.
This could be somewhere that belonged, at least temporarily, to the two of us.
Suddenly, staying there with him didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.
We didn’t have to abandon my house. We could come home at weekends. I could still gradually do the things I wanted to do there.
But during the week, perhaps we could have this other little life.
Our own space.
The job wasn’t due to begin until sometime in January, which gave us a few weeks to think about everything and look forward to it.
And I was incredibly proud of Stephen.
When he told me how the opportunity had arisen, what impressed me most was that he hadn’t sat quietly waiting for somebody else to notice him. He had talked to the man. He had told him what he could do. He had put himself forward.
There was something fearless about it.
Stephen could sometimes doubt himself enormously, but at other times he had an ability to seize an opportunity that I admired. On this occasion, he had simply been brave enough to enter into a conversation and see where it led.
And look where it had led.
Only a few weeks earlier, I had left the job that had dominated our lives for eighteen months. Now I had found somewhere I already knew I could be happy, Stephen appeared to have stumbled into what sounded like the perfect job, my son’s faith in him was returning, our finances suddenly looked secure again and the possibility of a little home of our own had appeared almost from nowhere.
For the first time in quite a while, it felt as though life wasn’t something we were struggling to hold together.
It felt as though it might finally be opening up in front of us.
Reflection
Looking back, I can understand why this opportunity felt almost like confirmation that we were still heading in the right direction. I had changed the part of my life I believed was damaging us, and almost immediately other pieces seemed to fall into place. I was happier at work. Stephen had found an opportunity that suited him. Our combined finances looked healthier again. Even my son’s willingness to work with Stephen felt significant. After everything that had happened between them, I saw it as evidence that other people were beginning to recognise the progress I believed I had been seeing for some time.
The flat represented something more emotional. Stephen and I had lived together before, but always in my home, surrounded by the remains and routines of a life that existed before him. This would be the first time we could step into a space together and make it ours from the beginning. After months of feeling that something between us had become flat, the idea of having somewhere that belonged only to us felt strangely romantic. Perhaps what we needed wasn’t to recover the relationship we had once had, but to meet each other again somewhere new.
I was still cautious. I knew things between us hadn’t felt completely right, which was why my first instinct was not to move into the flat at all. I wanted to see whether changing jobs and having more time would naturally restore some of what we had lost. But when I saw the flat, caution began giving way to possibility. We didn’t have to make one enormous decision. We could keep my house, spend weekends there and try this different life during the week. It seemed to offer independence and togetherness at the same time.
Most of all, I was proud of Stephen. Years earlier, I had wanted him to stop waiting for life to happen to him and begin creating opportunities for himself. Now I had watched him do exactly that. A conversation on somebody else’s job had turned into the possibility of stable work, his own income and a home. It seemed like another example of the man I had always believed Stephen could become when he trusted himself enough to step forward.
Everything appeared to be aligning at precisely the moment I thought we needed a fresh start. I had more of myself to give again, and Stephen seemed about to begin the most promising working chapter I had ever seen him enter. Even the distance that had developed between us no longer frightened me quite so much. We were being offered time, privacy and a new space in which to find each other again. It was difficult not to look at everything opening up in front of us and believe that perhaps this was exactly what we had been waiting for.
