BARELY HOLDING ON

Chapter 7 – A Family of Change

The search for a mate feels like a weather system you carry inside you, one that shifts with every step you take and every room you walk into. Its something akin to then urge to go walkabout for us with Aboriginal blood coursing through our veins, perhaps even stronger. You learn to read its signs the way you learn the tides: by watching the air, listening for the whisper of rain in a distance you cannot name. I spent years measuring the weather of my own life, wondering if there was a compass somewhere that would insist I point toward a shore I could finally reach. The search was not a grand romance at the start. It was a series of careful tests, the way a door opens with a sigh when the hinges have been oiled just enough, the way a streetlight flickers and steadies you with its pale yellow patience.

I spent nights in rooms that could have been anyone’s, bright walls that reflected the wrong kind of light, a bed that seemed too big for one man, a window that faced a street where buses hissed and brakes squealed and the world kept moving as if nothing had changed. The search was eternal because loneliness isn’t a destination; it is a practice you refine, like learning to ride a bicycle again after a long winter. You tell yourself that a partner is not a rescue mission but a co-pilot who might navigate your weather with you. You tell yourself you don’t need to justify wanting a companion, that companionship isn’t a luxury but a basic harness against gravity.

I was at TAFE, learning numbers and balance sheets the way a diver learns the pressure of water: slowly, then suddenly, then with a kind of resigned trust. Clare walked into that classroom on the second week of year 3, a stripe of pencil behind her ear, a tote bag heavier than the books she carried, and the sort of calm I didn’t know I needed until it found me. She wasn’t loud about her potential; she didn’t announce it as if it were a flag she carried. Instead, there was a quiet shape to her, the way the light pooled in the corner of the room, the way dust motes drifted like pale snow in a sunbeam. Her presence didn’t demand anything; it offered a chair and a shared problem and the sense that a life, perhaps, could be rearranged into something else that wouldn’t break so easily.

She had been a finalist in Secretary of the Year, with typing speed among other things that were “out of this world”, but wanted far more than custodial-type duties. Her parents, having adopted her and her brother, were academics. Their interpretation of me as a mate for their daughter was that I had potential, a potential they were very quick to voice wanted to see blossom with gusto.

You hear stories about “shipshape” marriages, about clever couples who consolidate debt like a single instrument and make a rhythm out of it. We were not that couple, not at first. We were two ordinary people who, when the right kind of wind came along, turned our faces toward it and believed we could sail. The early years taste of quiet victories: the first apartment you can call yours, That was a rental at Rockdale, from their our first property purchase at Mortdale was one of our own, both units that feels like a safe harbour even when the street outside is loud and indifferent; refinanced credit that lets you move a little faster than the pace of life would otherwise permit; the sense that you have built something sturdy enough to weather the weather of debt and desire.

From there we found ourselves at Beverley Hills in a fibro house, until eventually, with an expanding practice running from my partner’s townhouse in Potts Point and with the one adjacent available, we purchased something in the form of biting off more than we could chew and started to chew in real earnest. The practice became a sort of icon built around two partners willing to take the extra step for clients as I, now having finished the TAFE course and achieved a Tax Agents certificate, had embarked on a degree via correspondence from Mitchell College of Advanced Education (now Sturt University)

The air in Potts Point was different from the air in our earlier days, heavier and more metallic, as if the city itself were wound around a steel frame and could snap at any hour. We bought into it with a kind of headlong optimism that comes when you mistake velocity for safety. A five-story townhouse, five stories! That crept into our conversations like a promise we didn’t question. It wasn’t about the beauty of the place, though it had its own stubborn charm, the way old brick holds weight, the way light spills down a stairwell with a stubborn gleam, the little balcony where you could pretend you were a traveller standing on the edge of a map. The market’s breath was visible in the air; interest rates rose like a tide you couldn’t outswim, but who notices a tide when you’re riding the crest of a wave you call “success”?

The spiral begins not with one loud moment but with a series of almost invisible shifts: a missed payment here, a delayed invoice there, a joke about “stretching” funds that sounds innocent until one day you realise you’re stretching the hours in a day to match the holes in your budgets. The money you thought would be a tool becomes a cage. The phrase “in her name”, a kitchen-chalk line scribbled in a way that seems innocent at first, begins to weigh like a stone in your shoe. The house feels like a machine built to keep you upright; every day you climb floors that seem to lean against you, the doors heavier, the walls closer, the corners darker. The Black Dog doesn’t arrive with a growl. It comes as a low, constant thump, like a heartbeat you don’t recognise as yours until it’s locked the door behind you and you realise you’ve walked through it without noticing.

Clare and I argued with a language born of shared history and too much fatigue. We fought in rooms that used to feel like safe spaces, the kitchen where a kettle’s steam could soften the edges of a stubborn day, the living room where a couch could cradle two tired bodies and a single, unspoken fear. The arguments didn’t begin with rage; they began with small, careful stitches being pulled loose. A misread interpretation of a situation; a misheard sentence; a tone that lands heavier than intended, or heavier than the other person can bear to acknowledge. We sought help before we were ready to admit we needed it; counsellors, then a psychologist, then a series of long, careful conversations where the truth was less a reveal and more a dissolution of illusion. The therapy sessions were not triumphs; they were careful disassembly, the kind of work that leaves you with clean edges and the memory of what you used to be, and the ache of what you have become.

In situations like this, Depression, the Black Dog, does not announce its arrival with a roar. It prowls with patience, with a weight you feel first in your chest when you lie down at night and find the air is suddenly too thick to inhale in a single breath. It is the weight of a mortgage that never ends, the weight of a bank statement that looks like a storm cloud in April. It is the weight of a decision you make that seems to matter only to you, because everyone else has already begun to drift toward a safer surface. The dog moves quietly through the house, a familiar shape in the corners of rooms, a scent of rain and iron on the air. It sits in the windows and watches the world with a patient, unblinking gaze. You learn to share its company because you cannot outrun its presence without becoming someone you do not recognise. You learn to live with it rather than to fight it as you would a predator in a field; you treat it as a long winter you survive by keeping a lamp lit, by keeping a rhythm.

The date of the door’s locking is not the day the dog first visited; it’s the day the dog sat heavier in our shared space, the day the air changed its texture, the day the quiet argument became a map of exits. I came home to a home that felt like a ship that had found a leak in its hull and, rather than repair it, decided to abandon ship together. The door, the lock, the weight of the moment, all of these arrive with a sound you feel rather than hear. The click of the latch is not a sound so much as a punctuation mark that halts a sentence you didn’t know was being written. The hallway lights flicker, an old electrical system, perhaps, or a nervous one. The sound of the radio in another room, the hum of the freezer, the distant thunder from a storm miles away, all of it pressed into one long, quiet breath that belongs to no one and to everyone who ever watched a life collapse into a single moment of clarity: this is not working.

The boys are present in those minutes of collapse, though they do not know all that is happening; they sense the change in the house the way a small animal senses a changing wind. They hear the tone in our voices that has dropped a notch, that sounds like a tool left on a bench, useful, necessary, and a little dangerous if you handle it the wrong way. They become observers of their own loss before they become participants in the loss itself. Our older boy asks questions with the blunt practicality of youth; our younger one tugs at sleeves and asks to be held longer than usual. They learn to move through the rooms with a kind of careful stealth, as if each step risks waking a fear they do not yet have the language to name.

The experience of therapy is not a cure but a slow reconstruction. It introduces small words for big feelings and trains us to listen to those words as if they were a map. The therapist speaks in a calm, measured cadence, precise, almost surgical in its clarity, telling us that depression is not a failure of will, but a misalignment of your interior weather with the world’s weather. We practice naming sensations: the weight across the chest; the cold, damp hands; the way sleep comes in fits, like a train that stops at all the wrong stations. We learn to ground ourselves with small rituals: the morning coffee the same way each day, the walk that begins with the same count of steps, the kitchen window that faces the street where a dog barks at the mailman. These routines become lifelines, not cures, but lifelines that tether us long enough for mornings to arrive with a little more gentleness.

The house, once a symbol of our ambition, becomes a complex machine. Its walls absorb the sounds of our voices and return them with a certain echo that makes us feel smaller than we are. Its doorways present thresholds we once crossed with a sense of purpose, now crossed with a wary reluctance. The bed, our bed, offers a certain truth: the sheets carry the damp heat of two bodies that once moved together in a rhythm that felt like a promise. Now the rhythm is different, and we learn to sleep with the dog still present in the room, not as an enemy to be banished, but as a companion to be understood.

In those years, I became intimate with the ordinary details of fear. The numbers on a page look like a skyline, and behind them a person hides who once believed in the possibility of endless growth, who believed that the next raise, the next investment, the next decision would produce an outcome that would rescue us from the gravity of the moment. The debt multiplies in the same way as the weight on my chest, uniformly, insistently, and without mercy. I learn to name what is happening: not a sudden collapse, but a long, inexorable erosion of equilibrium. I learn to hold back words that would inflame and choose words that would heal a little, even if the healing is only temporary. The refrain becomes quieter: you are not alone. It’s a whisper I tell myself in the morning, when the world’s first light slides across the floor with the ease of a lie that might someday become the truth.

The older version of me, a man who believed in the certainty of the future through the certainty of numbers, would be surprised by how much time is spent learning to listen. Not listening to the loud declarations of superiority or failure, but listening to the room’s quiet after you speak. The wall’s texture; the sound of rain on a metal awning outside the kitchen; the feel of the railing under your hand when you walk the stairs, one hand on the banister, one hand on a fear you refuse to name aloud. This is the work: to notice, to describe, to resist the impulse to erase, to preserve the small truths you can cling to when the rest of the house seems to be dissolving into dust.

There is a moment I will not forget, though it is delicate in its resonance: the afternoon I took the boys to the park while Clare stayed at home, the sun a pale coin in the sky, the air cool with the promise of rain. The park bench carried the imprint of a hundred families, the scent of damp earth and wood chips, the distant laughter of a child with sand in their shoes. My younger son pressed his face into my jacket, and I pressed my own face into the same coat, letting the fabric catch some of the winter air and hold it a moment longer than it should. We talked about nothing in particular, the game we were playing with a ball, the colour of a leaf, the way the clouds looked as if they might spill light onto the world. But the talk carried something heavier too: the unspoken question of how long we could endure, how long we could keep love as a common structure when fear intrudes so easily into the body. The dog lay at my feet, a quiet, steady presence that did not demand anything but did somehow offer something, a kind of steadiness I could not name in words.

The lens of time shifts slowly, but it shifts. We begin to understand that the loss is not a single moment but a cumulative event, apparent in the documents, the conversations with lawyers, the unsaid things between us as we walk past each other in the hallway with a step that is too quick, a pause that is too long. The two boys grow a little taller in the days that follow, and with that growth comes their own changes, the way they become suspicious of their own feelings, the way they begin to learn the vocabulary of separation without the words to express it. We do not always recognise the changes in the moment; it is only in retrospect that you see how the house, the marriage, the life that seemed so certain, wrapped itself into a different shape, one you can still live in, but not in the same way.

The dog lies still in the late afternoon, its breath a soft, visible line in the cold air that slips through the window like a whisper. I stand and look at the room I have known for so long, the room that holds the memory of every decision that brought us to this point. The weight continues to press, but I am learning to carry it in a different way, an alignment of effort and acceptance, a restraint that is not defeat but a kind of intelligent pacing. The road ahead remains uncertain, but it is a road we walk with the knowledge that we are not alone, that there are other people walking their own roads, and that there is a possibility of repair, no matter how small the seam seems at first.

All of a sudden I am alone again, as if I wasnt already.