This We Believe
(2009-03-25)
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Special thanks to WMKY in Murray, KY for production assistance.
Special thanks to WMKY in Murray, KY for production assistance.
As a child I had a home. I loved being home, except when the relatives came for holiday dinners and got into yelling matches about Philadelphia politics. Home then became the kitchen, and I learned to eat fast and start clearing the dining room table before the yelling began. College and graduate school accustomed me to living in someone else's space, and my childhood home stopped feeling like home. Family holidays were on the west, not the east, coast, and when I flew out there, I never knew where I would sleep. I was a graduate student, so I guess this seemed normal at the time.
Finally, I married and settled - or so I thought - into a home of my own. I even wrote a short story that was published in a regional anthology and in the local newspaper, which described the way in which the gift of Christmas ornaments, from my mother-in-law in my new "home" town, made me feel at home. Holidays then were about going to the "right" parties, drinking the "right" and champagne, coming up with the "right" gift. I never felt comfortable with what was "right," though.
And then that life exploded. My son and I were part of the debris field, but fortunately we ended up safe and sound in a small western Kentucky college town, where I had secured a tenure-track teaching position. Time passed, my son and I grew, and one day I realized that, for the first time in my adult life, I was home. Home wasn't anything like what I'd thought it would be: I'd always fancied myself a beach person, and in fact in graduate school I fled to the Jersey Shore probably more often than was appropriate; I'd always fancied myself an East Coast person, and in fact had fled the West Coast the only time I'd ever lived there; I'd always fancied myself a married person . . . but here I was, a single mom with a fantastic kid, two dogs, a cat, and a home. Home.
I just spent three days away from home, on business for the university, out in California. My son, who had traveled with me on both of my business trips last month, didn't want to go, so friends offered to keep him here. I enjoyed San Francisco, but I just wanted to get home. And my son, about six blocks away, enjoyed my friends' household, and his fun friends and their snuggly dog, but he just wanted to get home too.
We're home now. Nothing special, nothing perfect. It's home. I have a home.
In a sophomore humanities class I taught a few semesters back, I asked my college students what home meant to them. They rattled off what had always been clich s to me, and there, in front of the class, I choked up, just a little, because to them, these clich s were real. Now I have that clich d home, too. It may not fit the two-parent-and-two-children norm; it may not be everyone's ideal; it may not be as clean as it could or should be. It's home, though. It's a safe haven, a place where both my son and I know that we are valued, loved, needed, warm, comfortable. In our case, it's literal, but on those occasions when the warm and comfortable have been figurative, the valued, loved, needed keep us warm and comfortable anyway.
© Copyright 2012, WEKU
