We Found Out We Were Having a Baby in a Cottage With Damp

Two lines and a patch of black mould

We found out we were having a baby on a Tuesday evening, in the bathroom of a rented garden cottage, and the first thing I saw when my wife Refilwe held up the test with both lines showing and started to cry the good kind of tears was the patch of black mould creeping up the wall behind her head. That is the honest image I carry from the best moment of my life. Joy in the foreground, damp in the background, and me standing in the doorway feeling two enormous things at once.

We had been renting that cottage for three years. It was cheap, it was close to both our jobs, and the garden was pretty in spring. It also had damp we could not fix because it was not ours to fix, a landlord who took a week to answer a message about a burst geyser, and a lease that went up every year by a number we had no say in. We had made our peace with all of it because it was temporary, because we were young, because one day we would sort out something better. One day was a very comfortable place to keep the future.

Those two lines on the test moved one day a great deal closer.

The nesting that had nowhere to go

I did not understand nesting until I watched it happen to us, and to me as much as to Refilwe. Something switches on. You start looking at the place you live not as a backdrop to your life but as the actual container your child is going to grow up in, and suddenly every flaw you had trained yourself not to see comes roaring into focus. The damp was not just ugly now, it was a thing I did not want a baby breathing near. The dodgy electrics were not a quirk, they were a worry. The fact that we could be given notice and told to move at the landlord's convenience was no longer a background risk. It was a genuine fear, because you cannot casually uproot a newborn every time someone decides to sell the property from under you.

Refilwe put it plainly one night, sitting on our sagging couch with her hand on a belly that was only just starting to show. She said she did not want to bring a baby home to a house that belonged to someone else, where the walls were someone else's decision. She said she wanted to paint a nursery a colour of our choosing and know that nobody could ever make us paint over it. It was such a small, specific wish, and it broke something open in me, because I realised I wanted it too and had been too cautious to say so.

The excuses I had been living behind

I want to be honest about the excuses, because I think a lot of people my age live behind the same ones. I had always told myself that buying was out of reach, that it was for other people, older people, people with rich parents or two big salaries. I had a vague, gloomy sense that a home of your own required a fortune I was decades from having, so I had never actually looked. I had just decided, and then arranged my life around the decision.

The pregnancy is what made me actually look, because suddenly the cost of not looking had a face and a due date. I started reading in the evenings after Refilwe went to bed, and I braced myself to have my gloomy assumptions confirmed. Instead I got a surprise. I began to understand that there was a whole category of newer developments aimed squarely at people like us, first time buyers, young families, and that the numbers were not the impossible fantasy I had built up in my head over years of not checking.

Learning the difference between a place and a home

The first time we actually went to look at apartments for sale rather than just reading about them on my phone, something shifted in both of us. We walked through a show unit, and Refilwe stood in the second bedroom, the small one, and I watched her hand go to her belly and I knew without either of us saying a word that she was seeing a cot against that wall. I had to go and look at a kitchen very intently for a moment so she would not see my face.

We were careful. We were not going to let excitement carry us into a mistake. We looked at more than one place, we sat with the numbers over and over at the kitchen table with the calculator, we worked out what we could genuinely carry once the baby came and one of us was on reduced income for a while. Looking at property for sale when there is a baby coming focuses the mind wonderfully. You stop thinking about status and you start thinking about which unit is closest to the parking so you are not carrying a car seat and shopping and a screaming infant across a huge lot in the rain.

What sold us in the end was not any single feature. It was the feeling of standing in a space and understanding that if we bought it, the walls would be our decision. The colour of the nursery would be our decision. Nobody could give us notice. Nobody could put the rent up. The mould would be a thing from a story we told, not a thing we lived with.

The things I did not expect to care about

There were practical things that mattered more than I would have guessed before we had a baby on the way. A development with security we did not have to think about every night. A little pool that I now picture teaching a toddler to splash in. The fact that the maintenance of the shared spaces was somebody's job and not another burden landing on two exhausted new parents. When you are choosing a home for a family rather than a flat for a couple, the boring practical things quietly become the romantic things. I found myself genuinely moved by a well lit stairwell. Fatherhood does strange things to a man.

We chose one of the smaller, sensible apartments rather than stretching for something bigger that would have squeezed us dry every month, because Refilwe said something wise, that a slightly smaller home we could actually afford to enjoy was worth more than a bigger one that owned us. She was right. She usually is.

The nursery we painted ourselves

The baby, a girl, is asleep down the passage as I write this, in a room we painted ourselves, a soft green that we chose and argued about and chose again. I painted it on a Saturday with the windows open, Refilwe supervising from a chair because she was too far along to be on a ladder, and when it was done we stood in the doorway of our own second bedroom, in our own home, and neither of us said anything for a while.

I think about that Tuesday in the rented cottage often. The two lines and the patch of mould behind Refilwe's head. The way the best news of my life came wrapped in a reminder of everything I had been putting off. I do not regret the years we rented, they were part of getting here. But I do wish I had looked sooner, that I had tested my gloomy assumptions against reality years before a baby forced me to. The one day I had kept the future in turned out to be a great deal more reachable than the frightened, cautious version of me had ever let himself believe. Our daughter will never know the cottage. She will only know the green room, and the fact that the walls are ours.