How To Turn Resentment Into Love

My journey dealing with big lifestyle changes during a pandemic.

The identity I had come to know crashed and burned in the months I transitioned into motherhood. The sleep deprivation, the ever-present guilt, the loneliness.

The supposedly welcome invasion of my body and my house with a baby and the stuff surrounding him came with cons.

Of course, I wanted a baby and I had planned meticulously to make room for him on a practical and logistical basis. The love was, as expected, automatically there from the moment I knew he was inside me.

But I hadn’t foreseen the shock to the system I’d experience when I no longer had the privacy to have a shower, or the brain space to think about meals.

The Youtube suggestions were no longer the latest songs or my go-to’s but of 10-hour long white noise tracks and nursery rhymes. My old shopping basket was replaced with baby wipes and teething toys. Sometimes, I went wild and treated myself to a nursing bra.

My priorities shifted drastically, self-care moving to the bottom — at least until my son and I established a routine, and more importantly, a friggin’ good bond.

The changes that having a baby brought on physically to my body and my environment affected me emotionally in ways I had not anticipated. What was worse, I couldn’t allow myself to deal with my feelings because my baby’s wellbeing mattered more.

Heck, maybe I had postnatal depression, and I never looked for it to be properly diagnosed. But it is impossible to deny that the journey into motherhood is hard.

While trying to parent and still keep up with all our other roles, my husband and I forgot about our friendship. That was the cherry on top.

It seemed like I was forever home waiting for him in the suburbs and he was always busy in the city. He was often unreachable, and I was desperate for contact. Of any form. I mourned for him to come home so that he could take up his space on the couch, the only spot that remained clear of anything else to ensure he knew he was welcome.

I shed many tears as I held my newborn baby, the only thing shining bright at the worst of times.

Emotions Manifest

I guess my feelings ran so deep they became physically visible in certain spaces of our home. Clutter was no longer mildly annoying. The lack of floor space was suffocating. The general untidiness of my house was intrusive.

The hatred for my home was reciprocated back to me. Big kitchen appliances stopped working within a week. We once woke up in the middle of the night to find a leak in our ceiling right above our bed. Once, a glass literally shattered in my hands, thousands of specs splashing into my face, my hair, my clothes.

The house had taken offence to my resentment, clearly.

I’m telling you when your mind focuses on something, the universe works to give it to you — good and bad. The Law of Attraction is no joke, and I was literally attracting chaos into my home.

Opportunities Can Be Discovered In The Seemingly Worst Conditions

The 2020 lockdowns seemed daunting and anxiety-inducing at first, but amazingly, they brought us some silver linings.

My husband and I were well over our rough patch and we became best friends again. For us, extra quality time at home was necessary, and I will be forever grateful for it.

I was actively working on my own self-care, too. I walked 5k every day with my son in the carrier, and in turn, I lost the excess pregnancy weight at last.

I decided not to go back to my old job and took up writing every day — the best decision I ever made. Turns out, this was a big reason for feeling the resentment I did for my husband. His passions in life never came to a halt when the baby arrived whereas it felt like mine took a huge hit. I felt conflicted as a stay-at-home mom. I knew I wanted to be with our son full time but I really wanted to do something else at the same time. I just didn’t know what, until I started writing.

The only thing I could not see past was my bitterness for my home. I convinced my husband to start looking for a bigger house. This became my new obsession.

However, months later, we had made no progress in finding one. House hunting became stressful. Nothing felt quite right and the finances didn’t line up. I came to the realisation that buying a new home wasn’t going to solve the issues I had with this house. I decided I wasn’t going to put my family through an unnecessary move just to feel whole again.

I needed to claim back the love I once had for this space.

But how?

Feelings Are Decided

“Home is not a place…it’s a feeling.” — Cecelia Ahern

It’s possible to feel differently about anything by simply changing your perspective first. I know this because I’ve done it. I just had to apply my willpower to do the same with this home.

I started to think back to when we first found this house and remembered the reasons why we bought it.

The price of it alone led us to look at it. And it’s even better now because since we bought it, our earnings have increased but the cost of the mortgage has not, helping us to be able to save and afford small luxuries.

It’s in a really good family-friendly area just outside the main town, close to all the amenities but far enough away that it’s not busy with traffic and town noise. It’s also a 2-minute walk away from a school — perfect for when our son starts attending it.

“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.” — Anonymous

The thing about gratitude is that when you start to deliberately focus on what you have and feel love for it, it spirals.

I started truly appreciating the things of our home that I liked.

The pictures I hung around the house — many of them taken in this very home, of warm memories once lived. My son’s bedroom, the room we had chosen for our first child when we bought the house, years before he actually came along. Our kitchen, my favourite room of the house, because of its light and airy feel thanks to the large double French doors that lead to our small but pretty and private back yard.

Seeing the good things in my house made the possibility of staying here less disappointing and more bearable.

My biggest problems with it were a lack of space and there being too much stuff. So my husband and I sat down and talked about what we could do to create more space. The first obvious option?

Marie Kondo The Sh*t Out Of It

The thing about space is that it doesn’t really matter how much of it there is. You will naturally fill whatever you have of it if it’s in your nature to do so. So we had to change our nature by being more selective about what to do with our space.

The same can be said for our brains. When we think about our problems, we tend to fall into the habit of only seeing problems. Becoming mindful of what we think about can help us to declutter our minds.

I couldn’t see past the clutter in my house. I thought we needed a bigger and better house without even considering working with solutions around our current home because of the negativity surrounding it. But when I became open to solutions, they started flooding in.

I had a new goal and I was determined to achieve it.

We began work with the room I resented the most — our living room. We sold a bookshelf that took up a tonne of space and didn’t really serve a purpose. I rehomed, gave away, or chucked away what was in it. There were a couple of smaller bits of furniture that didn’t need to be in the room, so they went too. The toys were all removed from the floor and squeezed into our TV unit.

The transformation that our living room underwent by simply removing stuff is insane. People walk into our house and say it looks like we had the room extended.

“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” -Socrates

What made the most difference, though, surprised me.

A guest once mocked a photo hung on one of the small sidewalls of our living room, mainly only viewable from the opposite corner of the room. It’s of my husband and I genuinely laughing on our honeymoon. I came to feel a bit embarrassed about the photo and had been considering taking it down.

But I loved that photo.

So I got stubborn. I decided to bring more attention to it by making it the main piece of focus as you walk into the room, above our couch in the middle of the largest wall. I surrounded it with other smaller photos of us and our loved ones.

Damn right, too.

Clearing Space Clears The Clouded Mind

“A dramatic reorganization of the home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective. It is life transforming.” — Marie Kondo

Naturally, decluttering became a little addictive. The more I chucked away, the fuller I felt inside. Each thing I got rid of represented my anger, my shame, my guilt, and my sadness — it was liberating.

We did the hallway next. Then, our garden sheds.

Currently, we have a spare bedroom which we use as my made-up office for my writing. However, I’m 7 months pregnant and the room will be transformed into a nursery. A year ago, the idea of losing my only bit of “me” space plus the spare bedroom daunted me. We have no family in the country and typically, if someone comes to visit, they come to stay. This was a big motivator to buy a house with an extra bedroom. But, instead, we turned a corner of our bedroom into my new office space where I’m sitting right now typing this. We also replaced our couch with one that folds out to a sofabed for guests.

Today, I cannot wait to put my second son to bed in his own space.

Job done.

My house feels like a whole new home. With less stuff, there is less to tidy up, clean, and organise. So it makes the job of maintenance much easier, as well as visibly giving me pleasure when I look at the clear spaces.

Your Surroundings Will Match Your Inner Self

I hadn’t thought of any of these solutions before because I was too busy focusing on both the lack of and the overabundance of stuff in this home.

Now that we have less stuff, I feel we have more. More space, more practical storage solutions, and a more efficient system to filtering what enters it.

My view on this home has done a 180 pivot. Yet, we didn’t undergo huge renovations or spend tonnes of money.

I won’t say that we have taken a minimalist approach to life, by no means, but I feel I have learned a lot about how we look at our problems. As with clearing space in your home, you can do the same with your mind. I feel so much more organised inside and out and much more prepared to tackle future issues that may come up.

Because I dealt with my emotional resentment for this home as I went along each room.

When I dove headfirst into the living room, I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing. But physically changing the look of the room made it much easier to let go of the pain. Also, moving the canvas of my husband and I represented my decision to focus on our love.

Every space I had formed a bad feeling for was replaced with a positive one.

I don’t see the old me curled up on the couch crying anymore. I see the new me reading my morning affirmations and drinking my only coffee of the day.

I don’t see my stressed self trying to rock my baby to sleep alone. I see my son running away giggling cheekily as his father chases him around the house to get him to bed.

I don’t feel dread whenever I have an evening to myself anymore. I welcome the time with open arms and treat me like a queen with a good movie and chocolate, or a really long catch-up phone call with my friends. I have accepted that I will have to wait till I am able to have my own evenings out since the baby will rely on me to breastfeed (as that’s my choice), and I’m happy with that too.

Takeaway

This is a personal story about how I changed my perspective. I changed how I felt about my role as a mother, as a wife, and as a woman, and in turn, created different spaces to fulfil each one.

The most important lesson here is perhaps that, no matter what is going on in your life, you choose how you feel about it. And you can proactively change your feelings by simply deciding to.

I chose to let go of the negativity and resentment because the desire to be happy was greater. It really was as simple as that, even if the actions I undertook afterwards were hard.

Your circumstances can change over time because of the changes you make internally first.

Taking up gratitude will help you see the good in your life, no matter how bad you think you have it. Forming new goals will help you minimise your problems and give you the incentive to solve the ones you have as well as filling you up with pride once you start ticking them off. Lastly, creating good habits will keep that motivation going to improve your circumstances.

All of these combined create the space you want to surround yourself with.

And it all starts with the decision to change how you feel.

Sylvia Emokpae is passionate about self-love, relationships, and motherhood. See more work like this.

Follow her on Twitter .