Edwina Bartholomew: My next big move is tearing my heart in two

Sunrise star Edwina Bartholomew has revealed the big changes that are coming in her life. See where she plans to pop up next.

My very first house had pear wallpaper in the kitchen, a huge veranda and a wooden fort in the backyard built by my dad. We planted watermelons near the laundry where parrots would get tipsy on the old mulberry tree. Our neighbours played AC/DC over the fence and Mum would keep an eye on us from her sewing room, stacked high with homemade clothes and costumes for the local theatrical society. It was the ‘80s in country South Australia and an idyllic start to life.

I shared a room with my big sister. I remember a line down the middle between her toys and mine but she tells me now that’s a figment of my imagination. You see, my memories of that home are mostly shaped by my siblings or snippets from photos. We moved when I was five years old and never went back to the home on Essington Lewis Ave in Whyalla.

WHY I’M TORN

This week, we put our family house in Sydney on the market. The first home we bought together as a married couple, where we brought our kids home from hospital, where our delinquent puppy tore apart pillows in the backyard and where we formed those very first family memories.

The facade of Edwina Bartholomew’s Sydney home.

We have exciting plans ahead to buy an accommodation business in the country near our NSW farm retreat Warramba in Capertree Valley, but it’s still tearing at the heart strings now it’s actually happening. Will my kids remember this house? Will I lose the memories if I’m no longer in the rooms?

We had just renovated when my daughter Molly was born. I had the last meeting with the builder the morning before going into hospital. A week later, I walked back into a lovely house with absolutely no furniture beyond our beds and a couch.

One of the living areas.

SERIES OF FIRSTS

My midwife taught me that I could use the knobbly carpet to coax Molly to sleep so I’d push her back and forth all day and night long. She said her first word, ‘hello’ in the kitchen and took her first steps in the garden outside. I swear there’s still a slight tinge of orange on the tiles from squashed pumpkin during the starting solids stage and I’m not sure we’ll ever find the car keys she’s squirrelled away somewhere in the house.

The kitchen.

From birth, we notched up her height on the doorframe of the bedroom, higher and higher every year as she grew from a baby to a little girl before our eyes. Then a year ago, another little measurement appeared on the wall; Tom, 51 centimetres.

Now, Molly is repeating the lessons we taught her in this house; encouraging her brother to climb up the stairs and bump his way down, to throw a ball for our (still misbehaving) dog outside and feed the same pumpkin to him over the edge of the high chair that she got away with.

The conservatory.

MOVING ON

My husband grew up in one house his whole life. I have lived in about a dozen. We will never be a family with one forever home, but as we pass this house onto the next residents, at least we can pack up the memories and take them with us.

Perhaps in 40 years time when my kids are the same age as me, they’ll look back too and remember the beautiful brick house on Abergeldie Street that became our first home.

One of the bedrooms.

The main bathroom in Edwina Bartholomew’s Sydney home for sale.

Originally published as Edwina Bartholomew: My next big move is tearing my heart in two