I hate it when people tell me I have a nice home. It’s seriously one of the worst things a person can say to me. Guests and friends rarely come over since I parted with reality, but even before then the comment grated on my nerves. Regardless, I hate it even though I know they mean well.
Sure, by all outward appearances, our home is quite lovely. It’s a craftsman-style bungalow, 3 floors, 4 bedrooms, and 4 bathrooms. We have just over an acre of land and sit in a nicely treed area. My husband spent weeks getting bushes, trees, and other ornamental grasses planted when we moved in nearly 20 years ago and the house was brand new. Now, I’ve got a gorgeous crepe Myrtle tree that’s blazing vermillion; in my mind I see it growing in the Forbidden City because it’s so spectacular. The scrawny Japanese maple has grown into a behemoth with leaves the deepest shade of purple, shaped like the stars that line the night sky. Candy apple azalea bushes run along the side of the house. They eclipse me in height and I am obsessed with them. Bright yellow Stella D’oro lilies line the sidewalk, and they remind me that life starts anew with each spring season. Admittedly, since kids, COVID, and my trips to happy camp, our yard has seen better days.
This is the home where my babies were born, lost their teeth, watched the NORAD Santa Tracker, and battled space aliens in the backyard. Our puppies learned to sit, stay, and shake on the fescue grass when they came home on that hot August day. There’s still a round area of grass that won’t grow correctly from where the kids’ pool sat for so many years.
With two teens, it’s not as clean as I’d like. I’ve never been much of a homemaker. One, I hate the gendered connotation, and, two, Mick. He was ruthless when it came to the house, running fingers along the picture frames looking for dust. And third, I told myself many moons ago that if I had children, they would come before all else. Sick days were spent snuggling on the sofa, summers spent out back with the hose, and Saturday nights were for popcorn. The dishes, vacuuming, and laundry can wait.
The entryway from the garage to the basement is cluttered with kids’ shoes, sports water bottles, random tools, and socks. A lot of socks. They are all dirty and mismatched, sort of like the washer and dryer two floors above decided to deposit the knitted miscreants in an obvious place to remind me that I’ve got laundry to do. Always have laundry. The kitchen is well-used, a cabinet drawer is missing a cover because my son believes brute force is necessary for dining on chicken nuggets. “Oops mom, I just needed a fork…I’m eating. I didn’t mean to rip the door off.” My sweet doodle dogs have nose prints on the back glass door, my car door, and nearly every window. The stairs are home to nicknacks that I hope someone will carry up the stairs, but that’s the dying wish of every mother. It’s all good, these are signs of life, a family, and a shared experience based on love and trust.
This is the home where I got the call that Pearl had died. It’s where I found out Mick was dying. It’s where I suffered postpartum depression that nearly took me out. This house has seen my happiest days and my worst. The walls continue to provide a buffer between me and the outside world, and sometimes, on my worst days, I think I see them moving like I did when Pearl convinced me that Satan lives in the vacant world between rooms. The breakfast table is where I first heard voices in my head, from my past. The shower is a place I avoid because of past trauma. I completely lost touch with reality in this space, and I hope it will see me through as I fight my way back. Right now, I feel like I’m losing the battle.
The problem is, this isn’t home. The place I was born isn’t home either. I have systematically removed the hold that word has on me. I had to. To me, home is a social construct. It is an ideal, not altogether real but not necessarily fake. We place such emphasis on it, that the place from which a person hails is hallowed ground. It’s supposed to be a venue for healing, celebrating, resting, and enjoying life. More specifically, it’s revered as a place of fond memories, scraped knees, and front porch kisses.
But here’s the thing, when you come from an experience as broken as mine, you learn to never establish roots. Never idealize anyone, anything, or anywhere. Never allow yourself peace. Why? Because home is where bad things happen. Home is where your mommy hurt you. It is where your dad pinned your mother in the kitchen until she couldn’t breathe. It is the place where Pearl and I were locked in our rooms, separated from each other, as punishment for not doing what Mick asked of us. Home is a place of twisted loyalties, love with what-ifs attached, and scary nighttimes.
Home is also the place that was taken from you. It is the place where your mother lost touch with reality, a place where your father left you and your mom while she was pregnant, and, ultimately, the place where you learned how to parent at 14 because your mom snapped and your dad disappeared. Someone had to take care of your little sister. Home was the place of empty cupboards and unlabeled cans of food provided by our church because we didn’t have any money.
Mostly, though, home is the place to which I had to bid adieu. Shortly after my sister was born, my Wonder Bread world was yanked out from under me. Mom was mentally broken with a new baby, and dad, the sole income earner, was galavanting and “finding himself.” When the bank note cannot be paid, the house shall no longer be home. I remember Pearl telling me to pack my favorite things to take with me, to her friend’s house, where we would live. It was about a mile from us, in one of the ticky-tacky box homes. I commenced gathering my favorite clothes, books, and other sundries when I was told that we didn’t have that kind of room. I continued to whittle down boxes and pack only necessities. I went through everything meticulously and used it as a time to purge old memories not worth keeping and secure those deserving of my affection. Boxes were packed, labeled, and neatly stacked. I made sure to keep my photo albums together so that I could find them when we landed in our new place.
Mick was nowhere to be found. This was long before the days of cellular phones; he could have been in Canada for all I knew. He was a power lineman and frequently went off to other places when weather events necessitated extra hands. Because there were no heavy lifters, my boxes stayed upstairs in my bedroom. Try though I might, I couldn’t carry anything down the stairs by myself. Pearl wasn’t on a downward spiral, but she wasn’t herself either, so she was not available as an extra set of hands. I assumed movers would be there to take our belongings to a storage facility or a friend’s garage. They never showed up.
Two days before we left for good, Pearl informed me that we had no place to put our things. Only our car and the small closet at her friend’s home. What? No place to put our things? I felt like she was speaking an ancient and very dead language to me. It took me a minute to realize that this meant we had no place to put our things. Nerves and panic set in. My last two nights in the only place I’d known since I was 4 were sleepless, wondering where my things would go. My favorite stuffed frog, Ribbit, my record player and Rick Springfield albums, and my scrapbooks that I’d pour my soul into when Pearl was in the bad place. It all had to go somewhere, right?
The day of our move came and went, Pearl changed her tune, assuring me that our beloved possessions would be kept together. It was a new, but very veneered persona. Instinct told me otherwise. I walked that mile, everyday, from my temporary roof to my Wonder Bread world with my 4-month old sister; I fed her and we sat on the greenspace across from my old bedroom window. It was sad, but I could see boxes in the windows and felt better. Weeks gave way to months. Until the day I showed up and there were big trucks, dumpsters, and a crew of men taking everything out of the house and throwing it away. The bank. I didn’t know such things could ever happen. Of course your things would always be your things. Right?
I suppose Pearl didn’t technically lie. Our stuff was together. In a dumpster. I ran towards the gigantic steel bin, tears streaming down my face, sister in a cheap-ass stroller from Goodwill. The worker men had obviously done this before, fending off a person whose world was being disposed of. But I think I was the youngest. And I had a baby with me. For all they knew, she could have been mine. I screamed and cried and begged. All to no avail. I finally gave up. Defeat coursed through my veins and I was exhausted. I returned to the greenspace to watch the contents of my room being gratuitously thrown into the receptacle headed for the landfill. I cried. Hard. My scrapbooks, my pictures, my favorite crayons, my dollies, my entire world…in the trash. I had already endured enough pain for being so young, but this was next level. I felt robbed. Lied to. Cheated. Angry as hell at Mick. Pearl, too, but in an entirely different way.
As I sat there that day, I promised myself I would never get attached to anything. I needed only the clothes on my back, a few sundries, and my brains. And that is how I lived my life, then and now. When I relocated myself to my new, eastern seaboard home, I packed my small, 2-seat car and left. Clothes, a few books, medications, and my purse. Paperwork, too. But that was it. I had nothing. Kept nothing. Wanted nothing. Worldly things can be used by people to harm you, physically and otherwise, so what’s it worth? This was one of the more defining moments in my youth where I readied myself for independence. When you are alone, nobody can hurt you, lie to you, or leave you.
How does this relate to my current home? I have a family. A nerve-maddening husband who I love dearly, two kids that are perfectly imperfect and carry pieces of my heart with them, and my doggos. A tomato garden. My favorite plants. The one thing I don’t have in my home? Pictures. Not one. Quite literally. I have no pictures of any type hanging on my walls. No paintings, abstract art, or anything that makes for a sense of permanence…belonging. I cannot tie myself to any structural place and associate it with safety, wellness, or family. Security does not originate with walls, light fixtures, and joists. And it never will.
My children have asked why we don’t have pictures. In the earliest days of their childhoods, I told them the walls needed painting or some other esoteric excuse to placate them. They eventually aged and went to friends’ houses and saw walls dedicated to childhood birthdays, anniversaries, and family trips. Framed and matted memories everywhere they looked, except their own home. One day, a few years back, my son asked me. I completely lost it. Cried like a 3-year old who lost her puppy. I tried to speak, and he seemed utterly lost as I snotted my way through an attempted explanation of our bereft walls. He grabbed my hand and said, “it’s ok, mommy.” He had no idea what I’d said, but he showed me kindness and grace.
But what he doesn’t know is that it’s not always ok. That this place, these four walls, I refuse to become attached. This is the one place of my making; it is my heart, soul, blood, sweat, and tears. But it is not mine, and it can be gone in an instant. To hang pictures on these walls would be the end of me. While the risk of it happening is really low, it is still too much. There is no cost-benefit analysis that will ever point towards me letting my guard down. I cannot take that kind of loss. Many of you will balk at me, but I don’t care. “Do it for your kids” my mother-in-law would say, even though she never knew the why behind my naked walls. I am doing it for my kids. I’m protecting them in the only way I know how…shielding their little hearts preemptively in the event, god forbid, our place of residence goes away.
At this point, I can only thank the universe for Steve Jobs. I am able to make photo albums and take pictures like my life depends upon it. I have over 500k pictures amassed over the last 15 years. Kinda cool if you ask me. And the real blessing of all of this? They live in this abstract place called the cloud. Which, in my distorted reality, is equivalent to the heavens.
At least there, I can guarantee my children that they will never experience the loss of home like I did, and that memories of us will be with them wherever they may go.
