I have spent a lot of time trying to give my kids a simple life.
Not a deprived life. Not a boring life. A simple one.
I wanted them to swim and ride bikes and play outside because they enjoyed it—not because we were chasing medals in pre-K or elementary school.
I wanted family vacations that involved state parks, bike trails and finding something interesting on a map rather than standing in an airport every other month.
I wanted our house to be the kind of house where kids could build a fort in the living room. Where somebody could come over after school and dump a backpack on the floor and start playing. Where dinner could stretch into the evening because another family happened to be there.
Our house has been 1,500 square feet for their entire lives.
No garage. No pantry. No playroom. No dedicated space for much of anything.
It is inconvenient in all sorts of ways.
And I’ve loved it.
I loved that our living room could become a wrestling arena by pushing around some furniture and throwing down a few mats. I love the impromptu bands that would pop up because the piano was right there out front in the living room. I loved that the neighborhood playground was part of our backyard, in a sense. I loved biking around the nearby lake on city trails. I loved taking the kids to places like Klyde Warren Park and letting a perfectly ordinary Saturday become an adventure.
I have never wanted my kids to grow up thinking that a good life requires a big house, expensive vacations, expensive restaurants, country clubs, an abundance of toys or a calendar packed with high-performance activities.
To me, the good stuff was always pretty basic.
Friends.
Family.
Nature.
A bike ride.
A house full of people eating dinner and Ghirardelli brownies.
A life that didn’t require much to be good.
And then life changed.
My office moved.
And we moved the kids’ school to be closer to the office.
What had once been a manageable drive became a commute that takes over an hour in the morning and close to two hours in the afternoon once you factor in school pickup.
And here’s the maddening part:
The office is great. The school is great.
The school itself is a much better long-term fit for our family.
Almost everything about the change has been a gem.
Except the driving.
The driving has been brutal…brutal.
My car has essentially become a mobile storage unit.
Sports gear. Lunch. Snacks. Gym clothes. Laptop. Chargers. Water bottles. Backpacks. Books. Emergency iPad. Whatever else the day requires.
And because we don’t have a garage and our neighborhood has frequent break-ins, I can’t leave all of this in the car overnight. So I pack and unpack it constantly.
One afternoon recently, I was in the car from 12:27p until 5:18p.
There was a 45-minute meeting outside the car. Relief.
A ten-minute stretch break.
A ten-minute trip inside a restaurant to pick up food.
The rest?
The car.
This is not the simple life I had in mind.
So about six or eight months into this new reality, we decided we needed to move.
Surely, we could find a small, simple house closer to work and school.
That was the plan.
And we actually found a couple of neighborhoods that seemed perfect.
Simple houses. Kids outside. Neighborhoods that felt like neighborhoods.
But they were still about 20 minutes from my office.
We would save some time, but not enough to solve the actual problem. I’d still be hauling half our household into the car every morning. I’d still be unable to run home between school and sports. I’d still be living out of bags.
Then we found a neighborhood right by the school and office.
The people are friendly. The neighborhood is nice. It works.
There was just one problem.
The houses are enormous.
And expensive.
The yards are small.
No parks nearby.
And I think I finally understand part of what has made this so hard.
I wasn’t really looking for a house.
I was looking for East Dallas in North Dallas.
The small, cozy old homes. The parks everywhere. The bike trails. The little shops. The feeling that you could walk out your front door and find something to do.
I was trying to recreate a place I loved in a place that simply isn’t that place.
And North Dallas has plenty going for it. I’m sure we’ll discover those things in time. But it doesn’t have East Dallas.
I think I’ve spent a year trying to make it give me something it was never going to give me.
And I have spent the last year looking at the houses here thinking, That is exactly what I don’t want.
I wanted a small, cozy house.
I wanted to have some money left over to paint and wallpaper and make it beautiful.
I wanted charm.
I wanted to make thoughtful choices about every room.
I wanted the kind of house that felt like us.
There were a few smaller homes in this neighborhood that might have worked.
Three this year, to be exact.
We tried for all three.
We lost all three.
One went straight to pending before we could even counter.
If that isn’t a closed door, I don’t know what is.
And then this house came along.
It is way bigger than I wanted.
It is at the very top of our budget.
I don’t particularly love the design.
There isn’t going to be a lot of money left over to transform it into the pretty little house I had imagined.
The empty-nester owners turned one of the extra bedrooms into a home theater.
A HOME THEATER.
Have I now lost all credibility with you?
I have spent years writing about a simple life and reminding myself—and anyone else who will listen—that we don’t need bigger and fancier to be happier. And I have gone to great lengths to teach my kids that life doesn’t need to be bigger and fancier to be better.
And apparently, I am now buying them a house with a HOME THEATER.
This is either deeply ironic or a very expensive lesson in what I actually mean by simple.
And the outdoor life I wanted—a big grassy yard, a deep, fun, kids-can-play-all-day pool, trees?
Let’s just say it’s not that. At all.
And yet.
This house changes everything about our daily life.
The morning drive will go from an hour-plus production to something closer to 15 minutes door-to-office.
The afternoon will be manageable.
We can go home after school.
We can change clothes.
We can drop things off.
We can eat something besides drive-thru food.
We can breathe.
Then we can leave for sports.
No more packing the entire family into the car as though we are preparing for a three-day expedition every morning.
My family loves the house.
And after 18 months of trying to find the simpler answer, I finally said yes.
And our offer won.
Which brings me to the uncomfortable part.
I am sitting here wondering if I just destroyed the simple life I spent years trying to create.
Because this house is not simple.
It is bigger than we need.
It has things I don’t need.
It costs more than I wanted to spend.
It isn’t the home I would have designed if I were starting with a blank sheet of paper and my ideal version of family life.
And part of me is grieving that.
But another part of me is wondering if I have been looking at simplicity all wrong.
Because what if simplicity isn’t a set of physical circumstances?
What if it isn’t 1,500 square feet?
What if it isn’t a modest house, a simple vacation, fewer amenities and a life where you can proudly say, “We don’t need much”?
What if simplicity is actually about making life work?
For 18 months, I have been fighting to preserve one particular type of simple.
And in the process, life has become increasingly complicated.
More driving.
More packing.
More unpacking.
More rushing.
More time in the car.
More logistics.
More exhaustion.
More energy spent trying to make the circumstances fit the philosophy.
I am embarrassed to admit that sometimes it means two fast-food meals in a day.
And suddenly I have to admit something that is surprisingly difficult for me:
Maybe the simplest thing I can do now is stop fighting for the simple house.
That doesn’t mean I suddenly believe bigger is better.
It doesn’t mean I think expensive is better.
It doesn’t mean I have changed my mind about what I want my kids to value.
I still want them to know that a bike ride can be as good as a big vacation.
I still want friends piled into our house.
I still want ordinary Tuesdays to feel full.
I still want relationships to matter more than things.
I still want a life that doesn’t require a lot of money to make it feel rich.
But maybe I don’t have to prove those things by living in a small house.
Maybe I can teach my kids that a big house isn’t what makes a good life while living in one.
Maybe the lesson is actually more interesting that way.
Because life is not a perfectly curated experiment.
Circumstances change.
Jobs change.
Schools change.
Kids change.
Our needs change.
And sometimes the thing that worked beautifully for one season becomes the thing making the next season unnecessarily hard.
I think I’ve been treating simplicity like a rule.
Maybe it’s supposed to be a tool.
And tools are supposed to serve the life you’re actually living.
So I’m letting this one go.
I’m letting the big house be the answer.
I’m letting the home theater exist without taking it personally.
I’m letting the small yard be the small yard.
I’m letting go of the dream that if I just waited long enough, searched hard enough and held my ground long enough, the perfect small house would eventually appear—and we’d actually win it.
Maybe it will someday.
But I don’t have the fight left for it now.
And strangely, admitting that feels like relief.
I’m tired of beating my head against a closed door just because I decided the door was supposed to open.
Sometimes a closed door is simply a closed door.
And sometimes the thing on the other side isn’t the life you originally imagined.
It might be bigger.
More expensive.
Less aesthetically perfect.
A little excessive.
And it might still be the thing that gives your family more room to live.
Maybe I didn’t kill the simple life after all.
Maybe I’m just learning that simple has to change when life changes.
And maybe the simplest thing I can do is stop fighting that.
