I have often wondered if you can ever really feel at home after you have grown up and moved out of your first house. You know the noise of each door and window and creak in the floor. The sidewalks were a map of cracks and roots from overgrown maple trees. You knew which ones were fun to ride your bike over while zooming around the block. You could set your clock to the Mr. Softee song as he pulled you from a game of manhunt to treat yourself to a cone. When you went to a store you were greeted by name and then asked a million questions about everyone else in the neighborhood. You knew from the knock on the door which friend was there to say hello. The rumble of the train was no louder than the fire truck siren and neither really disturbed you much. They were all part of the noise of childhood. You knew every smell, sight and sound...
Last night I drove by another old neighborhood. It was my first apartment when I moved away from the second home I had ever lived in (never really felt at home there either). I only spent two years there. I know some roads well but others are still a mystery because of the short time I was around. It always feels a little odd to drive those streets again knowing that my drive home is not just down the road a bit. That life feels like forever ago. Then there's the local home I have to pass all of the time. My first official home...the one that I owned. My name was on a deed. When we drive by I always say hello to it in my head which is echoed by my daughter saying out loud "Hello old house!" with excitement (and a tad bit of sadness).
I have lived in my current house for almost five years now. Home? Nope. I have never been able to call it home...not in that sense, anyway. It has been many things to me...a place for wonderful parties, the site of a beautiful wedding, the music hall for my daughter's piano, and where I made many first recipes. But it has also been the place of sadness...where I watched my cat slowly get ill, where basements have flooded irreplaceable memories, where worlds have crumbled financially and emotionally and where a mother has said goodbye to this world.
I have thought long and hard at this concept of "home". I strive for it someday. I hope to find the right porch for drinking lemonade. The right weeping willow branches to play in. To have the sense of neighbors and friends. To have my seat on my couch under my lamp reading my book and to be able to sigh at the thought of feeling at home. A knock at the door (or no knock at all) means a friend popping in for coffee and a giggle. The smell of a pie in the oven. Pets snuggled on laps. Peace, love, simplicity.
I spent last night at an event that honored women and an organization that fought homelessness and the struggles that go with it. These women were recovering addicts, mothers of many children, had education challenges and were finding jobs and health benefits. I realized the root of feeling not at home...starts within your own skin. The building...the location...the people around you...they aren't the key. You are. Everything else falls into place AFTER that. But when you don't know your own spirit, when you have lost the body that housed your soul, when your heart is somewhat in pieces...it's hard to live in the dwelling known as "home". Maybe home is that feeling of being okay with yourself. We are all striving for the different structure, the other person, the perfect job, etc....maybe we just need to move into ourselves, put up a few pieces of artwork that inspire us and get a screen door for the porch. One that allows us to breathe. One that lets us hear the call of a friend. We have been bolted behind a steel door in a house full of clutter. Our house. Maybe if the house is cleaned out and we find who we really are...maybe then we can start to feel like home. No two story colonial with 2.5 baths and 4 bedrooms can give us a home. We have had a key all along...not to a house...but to ourselves and in that we just might find "home" after all.
This is EXACTLY what I've been thinking about lately, especially after this last trip back to NY. I was a man without a country! I felt like I did not belong anywhere I went. I wound up packing up and staying in a hotel in New Jersey. Nothing felt right to me. My apartment of 15 years is under sublet, my mom's house is not conducive to me staying for long periods of time, my aunt's house is out of the way, and I have had a hard time couch surfing. I was so depressed in NY i can't even begin to tell you! I am struggling so hard right now as to where my "home" is. I really can't blog about my trip home as my mom reads my blogs. She would be devastated if I wrote what I was actually feeling. I may have to write a super super private blog that only 2 people know about! I will let loose on that one.
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M
A home is definitely your family, not the boards around you. I had suffered from some anxiety back in 2001 after 9/11. My parents were selling my childhood home about a month after the towers feel and our best friends were moving to PA. I cried and cried. I felt like all those memories were just being sold. As luck turned, my sister bought it and when I visit her, despite her flavor now throughout the house, I feel at 'home'. No other place has ever given me that same feeling. I understand what you are looking for. But I am wondering if it's something you just feel as a child. And I know you just well enough that I think you are giving that feeling of 'home' to your kids. It's hard to be at the apex of the family and I think you are doing a wonderful, wonderful job.
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