Democracy begins at home

I have three children, aged 3, 5 and 7. We live in a comfortable house with a modest garden in a commutable, upper-middle class area of London but it pains me when my children complain about taking almost an hour to go to Central London, or when they say they prefer go to Richmond Park because our garden is not big enough to have a Pony.

A month ago, I decided that democracy begins at home and I gave the family a vote on the matter.

My wife was skeptic. She said she would love to live in central London, in a huge house and have a pony or two, but she wasn’t sure of the trade-offs so she cautiously voted to stay. My children loved the idea and cried out for me to just do it.

I have always been of the thought that our life is good as it is and that a change to a better house would have too many downsides to be worth the while. But I’m also the head of the household and I take it as my duty to fulfil the wishes of my family, so 3votes against 2, we set sail into our journey.

My wife was reluctant, she moaned and moaned about how the voting was wrong and she called me on my own opinion to stay in the house but I called her out on her lack of sense of democracy.

We had been outvoted. She had been outvoted. She should stop moaning and respect the will of our children. I’d carry on with my duties as the head of the household.

The first thing I did, of course, was to sell our house. I wanted to send a strong message that we were not staying in the house, no matter what. My wife told me that the sale was impulsive, that we should have found the new place before selling and I had to lecture her on democracy again: Moving means moving.

We are leaving the house. We sell it, we buy another one later. That’s how it’s done. Ultimately, I had to tell her, we made the decision to leave, so if we don’t find a new house, we rent something, or we go to an AirBnB, or we go live with our relatives.

No house is better than staying in this house, I told her, we’re better out of this house no matter our fate. She must learn to get over her frustration at losing. While it is of some importance that we find the right place for all of us to be happy, it is more important that we all do what the majority says. The children won. We lost. We are leaving the house. She should try to be helpful instead.

I’m not naïve, though. I do know it takes four to six weeks in average to complete the purchase of the a house, so we agreed not to give the keys to our house until 6 weeks from now. By then, we will have the keys to our new home, we will settle, end of the story. Then we can start buying ponies.

Yes, there would be some anxiety for a few weeks, for sure. We are feeling it already. And yes, we knew we may have to sell one of the children’s kidneys on the black market to fund this plan, but each child has two kidneys, we’ll emerge victorious, minus a kidney or two. I can’t imagine anyone complaining when we are living in our big house by Regents Park with a haras of ponies on our garden.

As I write this we are a week away from giving the keys to our house. We haven’t found our hew home yet. It seems anything that ticks all the boxes can’t be paid with one kidney. Gosh, not even with all three (and, you know, there is no magical kidney tree, so we have to find an alternative, but I’m confident we will).

It turns out the people who sell the houses we want to buy, don’t want to play fairly. They say we have to pay what they ask if we want the house. I keep telling them that there are two sides to the negotiation and that we don’t have the money they are asking.

Darn. We don’t have half the money they are asking.

But they are stubborn and hypocritical. So we walked away. It’s their loss if they didn’t help me buy their houses.

The children are recovering slowly from their operations. Two of them regret we sold the house. The other one says is all worthy to have ponies in the garden. I say we should all follow his optimism.

My wife is unhappy, she blames me for giving a vote to the children, she says it was wrong to ask them. She keeps telling me to ask the children for a second opinion but this is what happens in a democracy: there is a vote and whoever loses will be unhappy. We need to accept and stop moaning.

We set sail to a much better home and everybody should be on board, no matter how they voted.

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