CHAPTER 2, POST 2 ▫️ Home is where the start is

I’ve met exactly two people, in two separate towns on the south Mendocino coast, who lived in the same house they were born in decades ago. A friend of mine birthed a child at home. But just about everyone else I know was born in hospitals. A major life milestone was the day they were brought home, tiny infants nestled and strapped in safely in the back seat of the family car. 

From the day we are brought home, we begin to learn what home is. Initially, home is where our parents are, where our room is, where we eat our meals and play with friends and sleep at night. As we grow, we begin to discern the layers of the meaning of home. Home becomes where our parents relate to each other and to us, where our personal space is, where we see our true family dynamic revealed over meals and confide in our friends and spend nights contemplating our future. We absorb these lessons, consciously or unconsciously, and carry them with us. We become aware, as our parents already were at our birth, that the long-term goal is that one day we will leave home to make a home for ourselves.

Leaving home for home may sound like a paradox, yet into it each one of us is born. 

Now, undertaking this challenge of examining the meaning of home, I find myself looking back. What I’ve learned about my individual definition of home is that it’s more than furnishings, geographic location, or the size or style of house. These and other physical factors do come into play, and I fully intend to explore them in future posts. However, what is even more important to me is the atmosphere of home. When I’m in my living space, I feel most at home when I feel safe, my needs are cared for, I have some time alone to recharge, and I am emotionally connected to the people around me: husband, family, friends, even community.

So it follows that when I feel afloat—that “home-not-home” disoriented sensation—I may be able to trace it back to one of those factors. Maybe I feel threatened in some way. Maybe I’m worried that my needs aren’t or won’t be met. Maybe I’ve been so busy I haven’t been able to be alone, even for ten minutes. Or maybe, even though I know love is there, I’m not feeling connected to it. Finding the source of uneasiness may not be easy; maybe it will, but the solution might feel out of reach. At any rate, it’s a plan of action I’m going to try. 

This is obviously based on my (very) personal experience. I could go on for pages of details large and small that might be part of someone’s definition of home. We don’t have to worry about what someone else’s definition is, though, in order to make our own. We choose what’s important to us and our home-mates. We make our homes. When we feel not at home, can we go back to our own definition, find what’s missing, and do our best to make it right? It’s worth a try. 

I will tell you that this process was not easy for me. It’s taken days to think this angle through, and I’ve had to stop several times as I was writing to do the emotional work. For some of us, identifying what we learned about home from our childhood means remembering some things that weren’t so pleasant. It helped me to reframe those memories, to put it in terms of what I could intellectually take away from those experiences. I was reminded recently that who we are today is a product of all of our previous experiences, both positive and negative. We don’t have to like the trials we went through, but they did influence who we became...and who we might yet become. 

The same concept can apply to our idea of home. The start of home for us may have been positive, negative, or a combination of the two. We may not have liked some aspects of our childhood home, and likely those aspects influenced qualities or other factors that we determined would (or would not) become part of our future home. Unlike the children we were then, the adults we are now have some control over what our home is, how it looks and feels today, and what it might be in the future. Having that knowledge just might make us feel a little more at home. 

▫️ post script ▫️

I want to thank all of you who stopped by and read Chapter 2 Post 1 last week, and to all who left a comment! I was truly surprised by the response, and I didn’t anticipate that this subject would resonate with others the way it did with me. I’m happy to have you all along on this ‘journey of exploration’ and I eagerly await hearing from more of you as we move forward! I was having technical difficulties replying to each posted comment last week, but I’ve ironed out the issue and I’ll do my best to keep up with you all from here on out.