Cath Jenkin: The Friday afternoon phone call that changed my life

In the unfolding of one stage of life into another, another stage of life begins. And all it takes is a phone call, a chance encounter, and the curious intervention of synchronicity.

By Cath Jenkin

In 2007, my metered cab driver took a different route home one day, and I spotted a beautiful block of flats I’d never seen before. A little voice in my head uttered: “You’re going to live here”. A month later, thanks to a funny Friday afternoon phone call I’d had with a friend who, unbeknown to me, owned a flat in the block, we’d moved in.

The same thing would happen to me in 2018. Fast forward a few years to the lovely little suburb on the other end of our city that we now call home, and, I’m not quite sure how, but I’ve become our neighbourhood’s emergency contact.

The joke of it all is that our little community now calls me its mayor, and it’s something I take a lot of pride in. I’m always happy to help out where I can, or rally the troops to clean up our local park. Because of it, when someone needs help, they “Call Cath”. I received one of those calls in April this year, and hopped down the road to a house I’d not been to before. Just a quick pop-in to check on something, and I was gone again.

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But something happened to me when I walked through the door for the very first time. That same voice from 2007 popped up in my head and said: “You’re going to live here”. Four months later, we’d moved in.

I’m typing this from the dining room-office that I’ve been sharing with my housemate and our children for 20 weeks now. I’m divorced, and no longer work with my dogs, Jake and Zoey, at my feet. Instead, they live with their dad, and two other dogs I now call my own, Roxy and Yoda, are asleep at my feet. I’ve submitted the paperwork to return to my maiden surname, and I’ve changed my address in all the important places.

When people ask me why we got divorced, they do so with astonishment. The most common question is this, usually uttered with a level of surprise that is most often reserved for that moment you walk into the kitchen and find your toddler lying in a pool of honey, flick-flacking cake sprinkles into the air:

“What happened?!?” I’ve become adept at answering it, once I get past giving them the “it wasn’t your marriage, so it’s not your divorce” talk.

Simply put: life happened. And, in the things that came thereafter: this house happened.

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A dear friend called me on a Friday afternoon, with an appeal for guidance. He was facing a barrage of horrible things, and a divorce to boot. I headed out to counsel him, not knowing that I would call him up with a similar phone call a few months later. Life happens like that.

We’d been friends for many years, and shared many a Friday afternoon phone call, where one of us would need the other’s help, advice, or just to share a story from the week. 2018 would cause us to step that close relationship up a bit and, when he called me to tell me about his new house, I laughed out loud at the address.

As my marriage unwound, and the decisions I needed to make were set before me, it started to make sense that the friend I now call Hedgehog Housemate and I should throw our minimal, yet mutual, resources together. Well-versed in being able to get to the meaty nuggets of hard truths we were both facing, it made even better sense to give up trying to explain things, and just get on with unpacking the boxes and building our extremely unconventional home.

It’s more than 20 weeks later, and while it hasn’t been easy, it’s been easier than expected. Last week, we laughed over how our kids were making noise across the house, and we were stuck working…the exact scenario we’d pinned our thoughts towards, as we barrelled through a pile of hardships we had to face.

Sometimes, you have to let life happen. You have to step up, pack up, listen, put aside your need to control, and go. None of it will be easy, some of it will surprise you, and most of it will shake you. Set yourself the objective of barrelling through the chaos, and know that – eventually – the quiet comfort of knowledge and certainty will settle over your life. Life will, however, take care of you, as a new beginning unfolds. You just have to keep watching for the sign posts, and listen out for the Friday afternoon phone calls.