The summer we turned twenty-seven, my husband and I purchased our first home, and the night before the sale closed, I began to fully panic.

The open-concept condo we had chosen, while spacious and filled with natural light, also felt sort of cavernous and kind of overwhelming.

But backing out didn’t seem to be an option, and my husband assured me we would put up soft curtains and design a beautiful privacy screen to separate the bedroom and living space. We would make it it cozy. It would be ours.

And so, the next morning, we loaded the contents of our barely furnished apartment into a single cube van and drove it across the city with our beloved grey cat, an enormous artificial Christmas tree that we remembered to retrieve from storage and a palpable excitement over the possibility of a real home.

But for the four years we lived there, we railed against the lack of useable spaces in the apartment, the beige walls and outdated kitchen.

But the truth was, we didn’t do very much of anything about any of it. We didn’t paint. Didn’t update appliances. Never put up those soft curtains (we did, however, hang stiff, transparent drapes on shaky metal guy wires). In fact, the more we lived with and in our place and the more we disliked it, the more paralyzed we felt to change it.

To be honest, we had never been very good at making our houses our homes. In the past, we had relied on a pastiche of repurposed, handed down and salvaged objects to make our homes relatively functional and vaguely attractive. An old mattress stolen from the basement of my boyfriend’s dorm, for instance. Discarded desks pulled from the side of the road. Cheap oven mitts and dented mixing bowls.

Fortunately, beautiful possessions aren’t all that feather a nest, and we worked hard to develop the other skills of nest building. We cherished each other, paid off our mortgage, invested regularly, maintained deep friendships, cooked every day, exercised and played.

Yet, the truth is that neither of us feels like we deserve a ‘real home.’ Some part of each of us is afraid to get too comfortable and let off the gas, just a little. Treat ourselves. Fully accept the gifts life is offering in this moment.

Still, we dream about creating the kind of nest for ourselves and our children that nourishes us. Holds us. Whispers, “You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.”

by Riva Soucie