When my marriage shattered, I opened my home to guests to pay the bills
Hosting travellers helped me glue the pieces of my life back together
This First Person column is written by Lynn Lau who lives in Burlington, Ont. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
I'm one of the lucky ones. I live in a nice house amid a housing crisis in a safe neighbourhood in a leafy suburb of Toronto.
I was a stay-at-home parent when my husband's job transferred us from Saskatchewan to Canada's most expensive housing market five years ago. We bought a two-bedroom apartment, in which we weathered the pandemic lockdown. It was tight but it was cosy, I thought. But my partner declared the space too small, so we set out to find a proper house to rent.
Our home rental application was approved entirely on the strength of his salary and the rent we would receive from the apartment we vacated. Rent for the house was $3,000 per month. My husband and I, our two school-aged boys and one chihuahua moved in April 1, 2022. Initially, we seemed to fit right in — we being a standard nuclear family, and this being the kind of street where neighbours congregate on front stoops and children play on the street.
We were still settling in when one of the most destructive thunderstorms in Canadian history blew through. Looking back, it's hard not to read it like an omen. We huddled in the basement as the rain fell in sheets. A terrifying wind blew the shed door off, lifted shingles from the roof and snapped the neighbour's maple tree in two. Miraculously, the magnificent maple tree in our yard — the one with the sprawling crown and trunk wounded by some earlier trauma — stood, unscathed.
Meantime, a storm of a different kind was brewing inside.
In August, my children's father and I had a rare moment of agreement: our 14-year marriage was over. I hustled back to school to retrain as a health-care worker.
We had moved so frequently throughout his career that I kept a spreadsheet to track former addresses. When he said we would have to move again, I resolved to stay. Middle age had made me stubborn. And besides, I had grown attached to that magical, indestructible tree.
In April, he moved out with our teenager. Over the year, rent for a similar home on my block had risen to nearly $4,000 per month.
I hunkered down with our youngest child in our now too-large home. In short order, I burned through my savings and was relying on loans from my retired parents. People who loved us held their breath. A divorced friend shook his head and said it was too bad I didn't have multiple credit cards.
Maybe my ex had been right: I would never be able to afford this place alone. I should uproot again and settle for a basement apartment in a "less desirable" neighbourhood.
Between Hail Marys and homecare shifts scraping in $22 per hour as a personal support worker, I realized I had a vacant master bedroom and a lot of unused space. I hung my shingle on AirBnB Rooms just in time for the Victoria Day long weekend.
Latent fears of strangers invading the sanctity of my home evaporated when I laid eyes on my first guest: an unassuming nuclear chemist who had driven up in a dusty company vehicle brimming with scientific equipment. Then, a pair of nursing students on a school break arrived from the U.S. Hearing Spanish spoken in my kitchen, I felt as carefree as them. My kitchen was transformed into a convivial traveller's hostel.
In the months that followed, my soccer-obsessed teenager got to trade ball-handling tricks with a procession of athletic guests: a Jamaican welder from nearby St. Catharines, a Mauritian international student on holiday and a 19-year-old from the Bavarian Alps who stayed for the first month of his summer internship at a nearby aeronautic fabrication shop. In July, a Ukrainian butcher stayed for weeks while he was cobbling together longer-term housing. I marvelled at the cheer with which he set out on foot each day for his job at the pig abattoir, and how he could feed himself for a week with a $20 leg of ham.
My current house guest is a Filipino cook supporting his young daughter and extended family back home with his minimum wage job. He's been with me for over a month and we often find ourselves sharing rice or noodles at 10 p.m. In his easy presence, I've gained something of a long-lost cousin from the old country. My boys treat him like an uncle.
Of course, I have encountered the inevitable irritations that come along with a venture of this sort: inexperienced travellers mistaking their homestay for a full-service hotel, for example. Predictably, a few NIMBY neighbours expressed their disapproval. I just avoid eye contact with them now. My divorce attorney says she hates my novel income stream, perhaps anticipating the need to explain to a family law judge why her client thinks it's wholesome for children to be exposed to "strangers."
But for now, the benefits are still outweighing the risks. My guesthouse helps me shake off the ghosts of my marriage by recalling the journeys of my immigrant parents and the chaotic displacements of their parents before them. My guesthouse reminds me that I am one of the lucky ones. Sheltering others, I weather this storm.
Do you have a compelling personal story that can bring understanding or help others? We want to hear from you. Here's more info on how to pitch to us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
