Marrying Home and Family into a New Whole
Author Tracy McKay and her three children lived through housing instability after her first husband’s opioid addiction cost her marriage, her house, and his life. She is now remarried and living in northern Virginia with her husband, Jonathan, a combined five children and one giant dog. In this interview, she discusses the role their house has played in uniting their blended family, healing her wounds and helping her writing career. Read more about Tracy’s story in her memoir The Burning Point and at her blog Dandelion Mama.
How did you come to live at your current house?
My husband owned the house before we married. We talked about selling it, because he previously lived there for over ten years and there were a lot of complicated memories for him associated with the house. But it would have been financially foolish to do so. It would have been a purely emotional decision. So we got married, and I moved into his home.
The question became how we could turn my initial discomfort and his unhappy memories into something new. I think we’ve done a fairly good job doing that, but it’s taken some time.
How did you make the home yours while also integrating children from different marriages?
There’s a complicated emotional burden when you are moving into a home that previously belonged in a different family dynamic, especially when you are integrating children from two families. It’s fraught. I was keenly aware of the potential emotional landmines coming in, and tried hard to consider all of the children’s needs.
Jon’s children divided their time between two homes, but I wanted them to feel that this was still their home. I tried to tread really carefully, but I also had to care for my own children so that they knew this was their home too. I did that by carving out specific areas for each child that were reserved as just theirs. I asked the kids what they wanted, how they wanted their rooms to feel, what was important to them. I didn’t let them make all the calls, but I did ask them what mattered. I wanted to incorporate them into the process.
I think it was important to change things for everyone. It couldn’t look or feel like the old house. So I flipped it. Over the course of four years or so, I changed absolutely everything in the house — every wall, every curtain, every room. I am merciless and courageous in my culling and decorating. I tear stuff down. I build new stuff. I am good with a screwdriver. Just this week, I replaced every doorknob in the house and every light fixture. It was the last thing that I had wanted to do.
How did you make the house work for a larger family?
I consider the size of this house pretty much perfect. It’s about 2400 square-feet, including the basement, so it’s really not huge by modern American standards. When I lost my big house during the dissolution of my first marriage and moved into a tiny rental house, I learned that I actually liked having less space. I could keep track of my kids more easily, because I could hear them while they played.
Jon kept saying after I moved in, “We need a bigger house. We need a bigger house.” It was funny to me. I kept thinking, “Are you kidding me? This is way more than enough room. It just needs to be more creatively utilized.”
Previously, part of the house had been reserved for formal entertaining. There was a formal living room and a formal dining room. When I moved in and added three kids, it was clear we didn’t have the space — or really the need — for that kind of luxury. We needed to turn all of it into useful space. So we changed what had previously been the formal living room into Jon’s home office, and we turned the formal dining room into our every-night family dinner table.
I also redid the kitchen to make it more useable. I added a big island with a bar where the kids could pull chairs up. They now sit at the counter and talk to me while I am cooking. The kitchen was terrible — zero cupboard space — but the island, which is made from stock cabinets from the home improvement store, makes it very functional. I like it.
Some of the children share bedrooms, though everyone has space and bookshelves allocated just for them. After Jon’s oldest son left for college, I was able to take his room — the tiniest in the house — and make it into my office.
What does it mean to you to have housing stability after facing instability?
Everything. When you don’t know where you are going to live, the anxiety and stress that it inflicts on you, your health, your ability to manage daily tasks, your children, their feelings of security — it effects everything. All of that is alleviated.
We know that we are going to be here. We know that we are not going to have to move. We know that this house is ours for as long as we need it. We can afford it, and it has absolutely everything we need.
It’s given my children a sense of stability. They know where they are coming home to every day. They know their bed is the same every night. You can’t understand how important that is unless you haven’t had it.
Is it possible for you to truly feel stable having experienced instability before? Or is there always anxiety?
I’m learning. It’s something I have to watch in myself. I realized after the first couple of years of being remarried that I was still storing anxiety. There was a tension and a holding of my breath. When is this going to fall apart? When is the next bad thing going to happen? When are we going to have to move?
It’s almost a post-traumatic stress thing. You can’t just put someone who has faced chronic instability into a stable home and expect them to trust it immediately. It takes time to build new neural pathways where a person learns to trust and accept that there will be safety in their home — particularly for children who have experienced trauma.
What does having your own office mean to you?
I was dumfounded that I could have a space of my own when Jon suggested it. I initially felt guilty taking it, because I thought we’d use it as a bedroom for one of the kids. But Jon was pretty adamant, “You need this space.”
Not a day goes by that I am not grateful for it. It’s what allowed me to write another book. It’s played a huge part in my healing, that there is something precious that belongs to just me and that was given so freely and with so much love.
Does having an office make you take yourself more seriously as a professional writer?
I think it does. As a mother with kids constantly in and out of the house, it was too easy for what I was doing to not be important because it was on the kitchen counter or coffee table. Staking out a small area that says this is mine for this purpose — and this purpose is important enough that it necessitates that I have this space — helps. It was actually almost immediately after I took this space that I started writing The Burning Point.
I think having a door that closes is critical to any writer, but particularly to a woman-and-mother writer. There were times in writing the book that I needed to revisit emotionally-wrenching memories, and I needed to not have someone pull me out of the places I needed to go. I don’t close the door very often, but the kids know that mom is working on something if it is closed.
How have you decorated your office?
I decided that I would not bring a single thing into it that I did not personally love. Everything that comes through the door has to be something that has personal or emotional meaning to me and that I deeply love.
I knew it was going to be a writing space, so the first thing I brought in was my writing desk. Then I started bringing in books and photographs and mementos. Just little things that meant something to me. There’s a little antique bookshelf the kids named Wallace (we name things in our family). There is a bulletin board with pictures of my kids and of California, where I spent the first part of my life. I have books written by people who I love. My first husband’s Buddhist singing bowl and prayer beads are on a small table. Oh, and my favorite chair. It’s the most comfortable chair in the house.
My office has become the little heart of the home. It’s the tiniest room in the house, but everyone comes in the evening and plops on the floor. The kids’ goal on my birthday or Mother’s Day is to find something that I will bring in here.
It’s interesting how material objects can lend a sense of continuity to home over time, sometimes more so than a house.
That is something I learned through all those years of housing insecurity. I realized that home wasn’t actually the building we lived in, because it couldn’t be. Home was the things we carried with us.
I could move any place and make my children feel at home, because there were certain things that would be there no matter what. My grandma’s table. A bookshelf with certain books. These things were what made home feel like home.
It worked for us, because I had been careful about curating what mattered to me even as a young woman. I had said, I want these things from my grandmother. I want these things from my grandfather. I want this bowl from my mom’s kitchen, because I had watched her make bread in it growing up. So now I’m surrounded by items I have collected from people I love.
What space enabled you to work and write while you were a single mother?
When I was living in my little rental house, my friends fenced the yard for me. Fencing the yard allowed me to go to school, because I could let my children play without watching them constantly. I could have half an ear out and also be writing a paper. It was a much bigger gift than just a fence.
You have done most of the work on your house yourself. How did you learn the necessary skills?
I learned to fix things when I was really poor and couldn’t hire someone. It was empowering. It started out with little things like fixing the toilet handle or the garbage disposal. I’d find YouTube videos to show me how. Then I moved to bigger projects. The kitchen in this house was really unworkable, for example, so I got out my pencils, drew a plan and built a bigger island.
Jon pointed out while I was fixing the doorknobs and light fixtures that everything I’ve done to the house just increases its value. It’s not why I did it, but it’s a nice bonus. I feel like I contribute to the family through these skills.
How do you and your husband divide home repair work?
Jon helps me, but he is not the handyman. In the past, he felt pressure, he had to do all the home repairs. When we got married, I kept saying, “It’s okay. You don’t have to do that.” We finally sat down and formed an agreement. He goes to work and supports us; I fix everything. He is not allowed to feel bad about not being Mr. Fixit, and I get a lot of satisfaction from doing handiwork.
I think it is good for the kids to see me solve these problems. Even though we have traditional gender roles in that I stay home and write and he goes to work outside the home, that’s our only traditional gender segregation. It works for us.
Living in this house brought stability and unity to your family, but you also sometimes want to live in California where you grew up.
Oh, it’s so complicated. I recognize and value what I have here, but I spent the first 29 years of my life in the Bay Area. I miss the sunlight. I miss the eucalyptus. I miss the cypress. I miss the redwoods. I miss the smell. I miss the fog. My whole family is on the West Coast, and neither of us have family here. I would just like to be closer, especially as our parents get older.
I also feel a little discordant with the pace of life on the East Coast. There’s a different focus here, and it’s not one I am entirely comfortable with. People are very driven to have their kids academically excel in ways I didn’t notice on the West Coast. I had a lot more friends keeping the margins of their kids’ lives loose and empty than I do here. I don’t relate to the constant busyness. It’s not wrong, but it doesn’t situate home with me.
And I feel a bit isolated. I think I am the only mom in our cul-de-sac that stays home. There is no walkability, except to my kids’ schools. Our suburb empties out during the day because everyone goes into DC. We live close to a commuter lot where Jon can park and ride share with people going into DC.
The reality is that we would not be able to afford a house like we have here in California. Not by a long shot. Most of my friends are priced out. My parents still live there, but that’s because they bought their houses long ago. The Bay Area housing market has been financially great for owners of my parents’ generation, but many of their families now can’t afford to live near them.
What are your housing plans for the future?
If we stay in the area, we eventually plan to sell this house and move to a smaller place closer to DC so that I don’t have to drive everywhere or feel so isolated. But that’s not going to happen for a few more years. For now, there is nowhere else where we can afford four kids, good schools and a nice neighborhood. Ideally, we’d like to move back west, where both of our families are.
In the big picture, it doesn’t matter what my reservations are about what might lack in my neighborhood. I greatly, greatly value the fact that we have everything we need. The fact that I don’t have to worry about having a place to live anymore is huge for a family who has lived through addiction, foreclosure, loss, and death. I’m grateful every day for what we have.
Interview conducted April 20, 2018. Interview has been edited for clarity, privacy and brevity. Interviewee is a friend of the Author.
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