The Universe Dropped a 12-Acre Portuguese Dream Home in My Son's Lap
From sleeping on our sofa to love and a home in 12 months: plus for paying subscribers, the 5 ingredients that made this 'impossible' manifestation happen
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In mid-February last year, the year he turned thirty, my youngest son Charlie didn’t have significant savings, a job or a girlfriend. Twelve months later, he was engaged to Thea, his childhood sweetheart, and they’d moved to their dream home in Portugal.
I manifested my dream home using sex, but we had a deposit. How do you manifest your dream home with no money? This is how my son did it, told with his permission.
But first, a little context. Because when you get where he was coming from— not from privilege, but from pain— his story is even more inspiring.
My son had a shitty start in life, no question. Being conceived in the womb of a mother at the end of her rope, a woman who weeps every day through her pregnancy, is no easy ride for an embryo/foetus/newborn. I blackly joked to anyone who would listen (almost no one at that stage) that I was suffering pre-natal depression. But it wasn’t a joke.
No baby deserves to be conceived in the circumstances he was. My marriage was destroying me, and his father repulsed me, so I’ll let you join the dots. Still, from that first double-line on the test stick, he was, to me, a little being. I looked at my 9-month-old and my toddler and thought, “This is your sibling”. So I stuck with the pregnancy. But I wept every day, knowing my escape was now further delayed.
His birth went badly. Of course it did. Bearing in mind our created reality meets the signal we’re emitting, and mine (depressed and fearful) was as low as the pressure at the centre of a cyclone. I had Miss Trunchbull for a midwife, who forced me to deliver on my back, and this nearly 10lb boy did serious damage to my coccyx. The result? When the contractions stopped, the pain didn’t. I couldn’t even turn on my side to breastfeed. I couldn’t move my hips or legs without agony. They tried to hand me my newborn son, and I said, “Take it away.” That was a phrase I had to clear from my guilt gutters, many years later.
I couldn’t walk for days. This proved decisive in cementing the damage between us. A large baby needs a slow birth to squeeze the amniotic fluid from his lungs. His birth was so rapid that I was spontaneously pushing in the car. Just after I told them, “take it away”, he was struggling to breathe, and they whisked him to the neonatal unit two floors above. For the next three days, I couldn’t see him. I was repeatedly told the staff were too busy to put me in a wheelchair and take me up in the lift. And of course, I had an abusive husband, so he wouldn’t wheel me up either. That precious bonding window closed.
For nearly two years, I couldn’t stand up from sitting without agonising pain. The hospital tried traction, some kind of magnetic treatment, and finally (the one that worked) an injection of steroids into my spine, which I had to wait nine months for. In the meantime, I struggled with caring for three under-fours against the backdrop of my baby’s endless crying. Pre-natal and post-natal depression; things didn’t get much better from there. By the time he was three and a half, I was going through the horrors involved in leaving his father. And what was missing between us didn’t get fixed — because I didn’t get fixed — for a long, long time.
There’s something about being forced into resilience. Charlie learned to look after himself. He was always the entrepreneur: ambitious and driven. As a teen, he made money baking cakes and walking dogs. Home educated from 12, and with an autumn birthday, he landed an apprenticeship as a chef when his peers were starting Year 11.1 He left home at 17 to take a live-in position at a pub in the New Forest. And for the next few years, lived in London, then France, then Australia, climbing up the ladder in high-pressure, high-end restaurants. That career path’s a hard one: double shifts, endemic bullying. Hospitality is a hotbed of addiction, since so many self-medicate with drink or drugs just to survive it. And if you had the kind of start my son did, you’re extra prone. ADHD (with which he was belatedly diagnosed) ramps up those risks.
The trauma of being caught in the first landfall of the second-most destructive Cyclone in Australian history added to his emotional load in March 2017. As Cyclone Debbie headed straight for him, I stayed up through the night, exchanging messages with him over Facebook until his internet went down. The resort he was working at was levelled. When he emerged from safety, bird and animal corpses littered the debris. Responsible for feeding the survivors until airlifts arrived, he crawled into the half-collapsed basement kitchen to get food from the fridges. Next a hostel in Sydney, and finally a new job in Orange, where he entered a destructive relationship that became the final straw.
In February 2018, though his visa hadn’t expired, he called us, out of the blue, with a flight number. We went to pick him up from Heathrow. He seemed completely broken. With all our bedrooms taken, he slept on the sofa.
For the next few years, he took easier chef work — pubs and pizzas. There were sometimes sparks between us; he was still the son I hadn’t fully bonded with. Twice, he moved out and rented locally. Piece by piece, he worked on his problems: achieved sobriety; resolved his mental health issues. And I also worked on my years of damage and guilt. Finally, while living with us to make it affordable, he retrained as an electrician. He was always in demand as a chef, but had accepted that cheffing was bad for him. Newly medicated for his ADHD, he was studious and committed, discovering a profound aptitude for maths that schools had missed, and getting distinctions in his exams. In these last two years, the damage between us was finally repaired.
This is all just context, so you know that the way Charlie turned his life around was powerful. Sometimes it feels like a miracle, yet it’s a natural extension of all the work he has done to grow. And there was another miracle to come.
The fabric of the universe is magic, and Charlie, of all my kids, learned that at his mother’s feet (and then independently). He listened, watched, asked me questions, and applied what he learned. Last year, the year he turned thirty, was decisive. In February last year, he was without money, a job, or a girlfriend, and back living in his childhood bedroom. By February this year, he was with the love of his life, living in the home of his dreams. To my mind, this turnaround is as inspiring as life can get; I lived through a similar process 25 years ago, and it’s wonderful to see this now-familiar magic unfold for my son, too.
I appreciate ALL my subscribers. Thank you for being here: for reading, liking and sharing. The following section is just for my paying subscribers as a thank you for the financial support, which helps me keep afloat as I work on my next project! Inspiration above the line, and the full “how it happened’ below.
