A House That No Longer Feels Like a Home

There are days when I realise that a home does not disappear because walls collapse, but because peace slowly erodes, until the place where you live no longer feels like a home but merely a space you retreat into to hide from everything happening around you.
Our life has gradually shrunk into one room of fifteen square metres, a childhood bedroom once meant for rest, but that no longer feels like a bedroom at all, because it is the only place where we can still exist. Outside this room, another life is unfolding, a life technically inside the same house, but one that for a long time has no longer felt like ours.
My mother almost always has daycare dogs. Four or five days a week. Nearly every day one to three dogs in the house at the same time. Dogs that come and go, dogs that run, bark, pee, mark territory, dogs that become larger than life with excitement when their owners arrive, while my mother talks and laughs loudly in the street as if a performance is being staged for everyone who wants to hear it, and meanwhile we try to stay as quiet as possible, as if we do not really want to exist inside the same decor.
Because of that, this house rarely feels like a place where someone can recover. It feels like a corridor. A place of constant movement, where dogs pee over one another’s scents, where our belongings suddenly become places other dogs try to claim as territory, and where we increasingly notice that we are no longer using this house to live, but to hide. Sometimes it feels as though our lives keep retreating further into that one room, simply because it is the only place where a little control and predictability still remain.
Yesterday I saw something that stayed with me. My mother was looking after two puppies, Mayo and Lixi. Mayo had clearly become her favourite by then, the kind of puppy that seems to absorb all her attention. From my window I saw Lixi outside, beyond the garden, while my mother had already been indoors for at least twenty minutes preparing food for all the dogs. At first I thought Lixi simply needed to pee for a moment. But minutes passed. My mother was nowhere to be seen. I called her, something I normally avoid because calling means breaking through the safety of our room. She simply had not noticed that Lixi had never returned to the garden with the other dogs. She was so focused on Mayo. Once again it struck me how quickly all attention can shift toward one dog, while awareness of everything else slowly disappears.
Today something else happened, but it felt like the same underlying structure. My mother wants the garden door to remain open upstairs so the dogs can walk in and out of the garden even when she is not there. During winter that does not happen because it is too cold, but as soon as the weather allows it, it begins again, even though that means dogs pee in places they should not, dig things up or poop in places that later cannot even be found again.
Today Bikkel came inside carrying something in his mouth. Rabbit ears. The rabbit ears that I had accidentally received because I had been naïve enough not to realise that a box of healthy snacks for Fannar could also contain that. I had buried them in the garden, under a stone, because I did not want to simply throw them away. To me it feels wrong to treat something that comes from an animal, something for which an animal died, as waste.
But Bikkel had dug beneath the stone and brought them inside. I heard my mother downstairs almost collapsing in tears and once again I urged her not to leave the garden door open whenever she leaves the dogs alone. Mart normally often checks through the webcam when my mother leaves the dogs by themselves in the garden, simply to make sure everything is okay, but this time he had not paid attention for a moment and then we ended up arguing too.
My mother replied that she had covered them up and that she was allowed to cry. I wrote that she did not need to, because she still had them, but she did not want to hear it, almost started vomiting and panicked. And then came the sentence I have heard so many times that it almost sounds automatic: “I live here too,” after I once again repeated that the garden door really does not need to stay open when she is upstairs. It is one of those sentences that rarely stays connected to the actual subject. Because the conversation was not about a dog digging something up, nor about the fact that the same dog had already peed on my girl’s grave multiple times because my mother had not been paying attention. It was about territory. About position. About who gets to decide what happens here. At that moment the conversation almost always seems to shift from a concrete problem to the question of who ultimately has the final say here.
I tried explaining that the problem was not the dog, but the fact that daycare dogs should not be left alone in the garden when nobody is watching them. But the conversation quickly spiralled away from the point.
“Who buries something in a garden where dogs walk around?”
“Just spray it away.”
“I’m allowed to cry.”
“I’m so angry.”
“Just fucking spray it away.”
“I’m done with what I am and am not allowed to do.”
And somewhere during that conversation I wrote something that, to me, was the real point. That Bikkel had once again peed on my girl’s grave. To me that place has always carried enormous meaning, but to her it seemed like a detail.
Later the tone shifted again. There was laughter. Stories about how Bikkel had apparently dug under a stone to find the rabbit ears, as if it had become a funny story. Those switches continue to amaze me. First there is anger, blame, drama, and then suddenly lightness again, as if the storm never existed. Sometimes it feels as though the tension is allowed to discharge emotionally and then immediately brushed away again, without anything truly changing.
But what stayed with me most afterwards was something else. My mother has asked me a question many times throughout my life, one that has always lingered: “Are you really an animal lover?” That question sounds strange when you look at what happens inside this house. Her own dogs have to share everything with a constant stream of daycare dogs. Their territory constantly changes under their paws. Scents build up. One of her dogs squeaks more and more often and follows her everywhere, as if he no longer dares lose sight of her for even a second. Those are signals that are difficult to ignore when you truly look at animals. Not superficially, but really look, because dogs that constantly receive new dogs inside their territory become tense. They mark more. They seek reassurance. They lose their peace.
And maybe that is exactly why the question keeps haunting me. Not because I am against her dogs, but because I see them.
And meanwhile Mart and I are still sitting inside my fifteen square metre room. The room that has really become nothing more than a hiding place, where the mattress sags crookedly, where the nights are long and where we try to recover from a home that once was a home, but has gradually become primarily a place where we hide from everything happening both outside and inside these walls.
And sometimes I wonder how something like this actually happens so slowly; how a place once meant to live in gradually changes into a place where you mainly try to take up as little space as possible, until one day you realise you are no longer living in a home, but in the silence between all the sounds you are trying to hide from.