Having discovered my impending motherhood while living in the dirty KFC-hellflat, it obviously made sense that my then-boyfriend and I should find immediately start looking for a new flat. The criteria were as follows:

We needed space for lots of clothes, shoes, records and baby stuff.

The furniture shouldn’t look like it had been salvaged from an 80’s house clearance.

It had to be in Rosemount. That extra five minute walk from the centre of town makes all the difference. 

On our second day of viewings we found a cute little ground-floor flat right at the West end of Rosemount and it was totally affordable too at £565 a month. It had a big living room which featured a huge black chandelier and the ubiquitous black and white NYC taxi print on the wall. Everything was monochrome from the white faux-marble fireplace to the black faux-granite worktops in the kitchen. It was perfect! Our application was accepted and within a week, we moved in.

And the cracks began to show. The flat had its weaknesses, but nothing was weaker than the relationship between myself and the man I had set up home with. It became apparent within a few weeks that we were unsuited, and that’s putting it kindly. Pregnancy transformed me from a messy, unpunctual person into the most anally-retentive control-freak Nazi on the planet. I can’t have been easy to live with. 

Things didn’t get much better once Violet was born. I cooked and cleaned without rest, and mothered Violet and her dad, and did everything I could to go beyond people’s expectations of what a young mum can achieve. That, combined with a stiflingly unhappy relationship, and the baby-related paraphernalia taking up all the space, meant that after a year, I couldn’t stand the place at all. I still think of it as a very unhappy home, despite the magical moments I encountered there. The funny thing is, that even though we only moved out 13 months ago, I can barely remember the particulars; the furniture is gone, the dimensions of the room are lost to the back of my memory. 

We moved on to the flat that Violet and I live in now, with every intention to stay for as long as possible. Her dad moved with us, but, within a couple of months, we gave up and he moved back in with his parents. And here we are.

Born this way,

Hetty