I have lived in a lot of houses. But there has been one common denominator among the many variables | Alice Robinson

When we lived in the country before the pandemic, I drove my children past a building site on the way to school. Green farmland unfurled on one side of the road, but the other side had been subdivided. New houses were going up. My children called one house The Mansion – less of a compliment and more an attempt to grapple for a word that would convey the monstrous proportions of the building.

The Mansion loomed over the road with such aggressive dominance that I felt waves of fatigue crash over me every time we shot past. When the windows were in, labourers started on the driveway, laying boulders. The rocks were so big a crane was brought in to install them. The effect was of a house that seemed born of some catastrophe wrecked on the landscape; as if, like a meteorite, it had smashed into the earth.

I was less interested in the design elements of the house and boulders than I was in the people who had paid for them. I wanted to know what aspirational vision for themselves they felt could be attained by a fortress. My own domestic choices couldn’t have been more different, but they too only revealed the anxieties and limitations of my character. My home was full of op-shop furniture and quirky paintings. I couldn’t have broadcast my insecurities around being boring and conventional more desperately if I tried.

“Every house you live in looks the same!” my friend J said five years earlier, after my husband and I moved from a one-bedroom flat to a weatherboard house. We laughed; the new house was twice as big as the old flat. But looking around the freshly arranged lounge room, I saw what J meant. Moving to the cottage had marked a hesitant bid towards establishing a family life. We weren’t yet talking about having children, but I wanted a baby in ways I couldn’t articulate to myself. Instead, I proposed renting the cottage. I set about planting a garden as if proving to invisible witnesses that I had the right skills and temperament for motherhood.

Middle-class Australians are obsessed with real estate, perpetually standing around in pubs and at dinner parties discussing the attributes of various homes, worrying about whether they can afford the mortgage. But if every home we live in looks the same, then people make homes, not the other way around. I have lived in a lot of houses – more than I can catalogue here. But in my life, there has been one unfortunate common denominator among the many aesthetic and structural variables: me.

The great joke of my marriage was that I never set up our homes with living in mind. “When you move into a house, you always make it look beautiful,” my husband used to tease. “Everything is always perfectly arranged. But nothing is ever plugged in.” Together, we moved many times, trying out new homes in new locations with increasing ambition, trying to outpace the environmental destruction we saw rising over the horizon, as if by finding the right house in the right suburb or town we might outwit what was coming.

When I was pregnant with our first child, we moved away from the weatherboard house to a small country town. The town we chose, with its botanic gardens and plentiful stores of water in the local reserve, seemed a safe choice for inner-city types who were also worried about impending environmental doom.

We brought the first baby home in December, and all was well for a while. But by July, when the winter rains had come in earnest, we discovered what we hadn’t the experience to identify at sale: our roof leaked in every room. “It’s raining inside,” my husband said quietly, as we paused together, panicked, and freezing, to appraise the percussion of water on water in the bowls and pots positioned under the worst of leaks. If a home constitutes a shelter from the elements, ours had failed.

We did our best to buoy one another because to voice the true extent of our terror and dismay would have been to double it. With parenthood, we had made ourselves too vulnerable, I thought. We were meant to be in charge, to be able to protect our helpless baby from the world until he was big enough to fend for himself. But we hadn’t done that.

Our last shared home, another house in the country, was watertight, with a vegetable garden and treehouse and solar panels on the roof. But after a few years, our marriage came to an end. What occurred was both incomprehensible and simplistic: we lived together, until we stopped. Time passed first in numbness, then grief, then numbness again. I understood myself to be in a kind of emotional freefall. We decided to sell our house.

When the pandemic arrived only a few weeks after we returned to the inner city, I felt a new wash of shame. In the previous decade of my life, we had done so much to prepare for disaster. And yet here was a real catastrophe – not quite like the ones I had imagined, but akin – and where was I? Not tucked up safely somewhere beyond city limits, but in a tiny, impersonal, rented apartment. Schools closed. The children and I were sent home, on to screens. In our new lives there was no private garden to play in. We huddled indoors like passengers on a boat in a storm, where the interior of our apartment rose to become the entire universe.

After months, as my panic eased, I noticed how the children utilised the space available to them in their games, moving from this patch of floor to that, like cats following sun. They were unconcerned by the shifting dimensions of their spaces, glad only to have the gift of time with their dad, and with me.

Eventually, I came to understand that, while my life had changed, it was all survivable. My grief ebbed. My new home – another apartment – looks just like all the others I’ve lived in, even though it is a fraction of the size of the houses, and half the time I am its only inhabitant.

I am changed by the events of recent years; those personal to me and my life and those grand narratives of the pandemic, the economy, climate change. But some things don’t change, even when everything is different. In my new house, where the children and I affectionally prepare brunch for my dear ex-husband, everything is aesthetically pleasing, but nothing is plugged in.