A house is not always a place where you can rest

When home no longer means peace
People hear this and often immediately think of visible chaos. Screaming, arguments or doors slamming. But sometimes it is in the things that seem small to outsiders, or even normal. In noise that never truly stops. In constant presence. In the feeling that your nervous system has nowhere left to go, because even home is no longer a place where it can finally let go.
We have lived for many years, and in my case my entire life, in an environment where peace is no longer something natural, but something we constantly have to manoeuvre around. My mother has been dogsitting for years, on average six regular dogs, with almost daily one or more additional dogs on top of that. Starting this week there is even another new dog coming in. To others that may sound cosy or loving, but for us it feels like a house that is never still anymore.
My mother talks to the dogs almost continuously. Not now and then, but constantly. A nonstop stream of words, often emotional, sometimes loud, sometimes as though the entire street has to witness the arrival of her favourite dogsitting dog. She has literally stood singing in the street this week, loudly, for passersby, as if it were a performance. For someone living with chronic overstimulation, that does not feel like a detail, but like a nervous system that can no longer land anywhere.
On top of that, the garden has long since stopped being a garden. Ninety-five percent is paved. The small piece of green that remains, the only patch of earth where something can still live, we try to maintain with great effort and care. We spent hundreds of euros of our own money on plants, went four times to a fairly busy nursery even though places like that cost us enormous energy. We remove seven-leaf vine, try to build something that brings peace. And yet that little piece of ground is not protected by my mother, but instead actively designated as a permanent toilet and poop area for dogs that do not even live here.
She even encourages it.
Because in the mornings she does not immediately take the dogs outside. First makeup, going to the bathroom herself, eating something, calling my grandmother and smoking. The dogs therefore learn that the garden is their standard toilet. Not because there is no alternative, but because it is easier for her. While Mart and I do exactly the opposite with Fannar: the dog first. Straight outside. Because you understand that it is fairer for him and better for the living environment.
People often dismiss dog urine lightly. As if it is just a little pee. But when daily multiple dogs use the same few square metres to urinate and mark territory, everything slowly dies. Roots burn. New plants fail to grow. The soil becomes exhausted. We constantly find poop remnants and urine traces between the plants and young trees, while we almost permanently have to monitor our room to make sure dogs do not urinate there as well, because my mother herself pays too little attention.
And then people say: just put little fences around it.
As if we are the ones who have to build barriers everywhere around plants and trees that we ourselves paid for and planted. As if it is logical that we should adapt to something that is being kept this way. While the strange part is that my mother herself likes the garden the way it looks now, with what we created, but refuses to change the behaviour that is slowly destroying that same piece of green.
We even offered a simple solution: remove tiles, add grass. A separate place where her own dogs and the dogs she watches could relieve themselves without destroying everything. No stone toilet area, but also not in young plants and trees into which we invested 250 euros. But she did not want that. Too much maintenance.
So the reality remains simple: no grass, no separate dog area, no boundaries around the greenery, yes to structurally large numbers of dogsitting dogs, yes to actively encouraging them to pee and poop in the garden, and afterwards the expectation that we absorb the damage.
The conversation about it perhaps says even more than the situation itself. When I brought it up, it was suddenly no longer about the garden. Not about the plants. Not about Fannar, who barely wants to go into the garden anymore. It immediately became about her stress. About how bad she felt. How much worry she already carried. How much stomach pain it gave her. How I should simply stop bringing it up. As if naming the damage is worse than the damage itself.
That pattern is perhaps even more exhausting than the overstimulation itself. You try to point out something concrete, and suddenly you become the person who has to soothe, explain and comfort the other person, while your own boundary is once again ignored.
Fannar feels all of this too. He is a dog who loves the outdoors, a real outdoor dog, and yet he now barely wants to be in the garden anymore. When we take him outside, he often stands pressed against the door again after the shortest amount of time, wanting to go back in. The smell of unfamiliar dogs, the constant marking, the unrest of a place that no longer feels like his: dogs do not simply ignore that. They feel it.
And the most noticeable moment of the day is often not when someone comes home, but when my mother leaves. Then Mart, Fannar and I almost sigh in sync, without even thinking about it. Only then does Fannar truly sleep. Not lightly resting, but deeply, immediately snoring, as if he finally feels safe enough to let go. Mart can finally rest a little too. His afternoon nap, which he physically badly needs, often no longer succeeds because of the constant triggers and the fact that we literally have to take shifts watching the window to stay alert.
And as if that still is not enough, it does not stop at the front door.
The neighbour smokes daily, causing the smell to enter our room. Helicopters constantly fly overhead. The neighbour next door is building a sandbox spread over multiple days. Three houses further down half a house is being renovated: hammering, sawing, sanding, a painting company working there daily. He also regularly leaves his engine running in front of the house, filling my mother’s entire home with petrol fumes.
The neighbourhood children are almost always outside once the weather becomes nice. On the playground diagonally across from the house, in the alley, in front of the apartment building where my mother lives: scooters, bicycles, kicking balls, screaming, parents who barely set boundaries. Even more people on the main road as soon as the sun appears. The neighbour even had a row of flowers removed along her fence because they made it too difficult for her to clean. Her garden is literally stone and wall.
And because of that, spring, once my favourite season, no longer feels like relief but like an extension of exhaustion.
For others sunshine means freedom. For me sunshine in the city, on stone, often means migraines. In forests, on grass fields, between trees, it feels different. There light feels alive. Here it reflects off stone and asphalt and pounds against my sensitive brain.
We cannot even easily go on longer walks anymore, precisely because what normally helps us recover, our car, urgently needs maintenance and we no longer dare take the risk. So “walking” means going to places where you literally encounter someone every few metres. People, traffic, dogs, noise. It costs energy instead of giving it back. We do it simply to not have to stay home for a while, and even that no longer truly works.
And meanwhile we still have to search for a place of our own. For land. For peace. For a place where we can live instead of merely survive. For a place where we can finally repair the camper and the car without constant stress. People often say it so casually: then just do something else. Then leave.
But how do you do that when almost all your energy is already spent simply enduring the day?
When you have to get up earlier after an overstimulating day because otherwise there is no time left to get anything done, while your body has not even recovered yet? When you are constantly occupied with other people’s dogs, other people’s garden, other people’s system, while your own life keeps disappearing from view?
We argue more often now too. Not because our relationship suddenly became bad, but because two people who have barely had peace for years eventually start colliding with that exhaustion. We rarely argued in the past. Now it sometimes feels as though even the last safe part is under pressure. And perhaps that is the cruellest part of all: that external circumstances can penetrate so deeply that you start doubting each other, while both of you know the problem is not actually between you.
Sometimes I think: imagine if we broke up, then what? As if that would solve anything. As if we would suddenly find a place to live.
That is the absurdity of it.
People often say that home is the place where you recharge. But what if home is exactly the place where you empty out? What if even your dog only sleeps once someone leaves? What if you are no longer really living, but merely being ruled by overstimulation?
Then it is no longer about dogs, or a garden, or someone who talks too much. Then it becomes about an environment in which peace has become so scarce that silence almost starts to feel illegal. And about how dangerous it is when survival becomes so normal that nobody notices anymore that it is no longer a life.