Photo by Valentina Locatelli on Unsplash
“The dinner was so good that I took the leftovers home last night and ate them for lunch today,” I said, excited about my recent foodie adventure. My husband and I were standing in the kitchen of our house. I had just walked through the door not 10 minutes ago, back from that week’s work trip and I was exhausted. Food was always something to celebrate, however.
The energy in the room shifted, its little tendrils whipping at me. I looked at my husband, waiting for the uncomfortable pause to end. “You mean you took it back to the hotel,” he said.
“Right,” I said, doing an about-face and mentally kicking myself. He was correct, of course. I often said “home” instead of “hotel” whenever I described my work travel adventures. This argument never ceased to rear its ugly head, spoiling a nice moment between us within seconds.
At that point, we had been married for 6 years. We were in the very first house we purchased, and it very much felt like home. I called it “home” when I was in town, which was only 2–3 days of each week. Home, to me, was anywhere that I was staying at that moment. It could have been my parent’s house, his parent’s house, or even a friend’s house. They were all the same to me.
But for him “home” was finite. It was wherever we lived together. He was visibly annoyed when I made that mistake. He was right — where he was should be the proper definition, but it just wasn’t sticking on my side. “Home” was casual, temporary, as mercurial as I was.
The first time the word “home” became a nomadic concept for me was when I left for college. Back then I used “home” to describe either my college dormitory or my parent’s house. It was neither and it was both. My parents didn’t correct me. No one seemed to have a problem with it.
Since university, due to the nature of my work, I had been living a somewhat transient life without a single place velcroed to me. Sure, I had apartments where my mail and furniture went. But I traveled for my job from the very beginning, so I was not in that apartment for more than 2–3 days each week. And since I had moved away from family, for holidays I was always traveling out of state to visit them. I couldn’t be pinned down.
What is a “home” anyway?
Merriam-Webster has multiple definitions of it, but I think the most socially acceptable definition is their second one: “the social unit formed by a family living together.” Sure, wherever your family is — that works for many people. But what if you don’t have a family? What if you live alone? What if you’re always on the road? What if you live a nomadic lifestyle? Is it a permanent location? Is it where you spend the majority of your time?
How do you know when you have a “home”?
Like my husband, I was born outside of the United States and came over when I was a small child. Both of our families moved in temporarily with their extended families at first, until more stable housing could be secured.
That’s where the commonalities end between how my husband and I were raised. He was raised by both of his biological parents, with siblings close in age, and they settled into permanent housing within a few years of their immigration. They lived in the same house for decades, nearly his entire childhood.
I didn’t have stable housing for many years. My family lived with my father’s parents for a few months. Then we lived in a temporary trailer park in the north, a place where my memories are marred with blankets of snow. Then we moved to the south, where my life became measured in fire ant and mosquito bites.
Shortly afterward, my father became a single parent. We would move around several more times in the same city until he remarried. Then we finally settled into a house that he and his wife purchased. It would be our home for more than 2 years, finally. I remember living there through middle school and high school. It was the longest I’d been in a single location my entire childhood.
My father and his wife would move out of that house once I went to college, in search of better schools for my half-sister. They moved across town, and the world I knew as a child would be replaced with white-washed schools and national chain restaurants. Since my half-sister was so young when they moved there, she would recall the new house as the only home she’d ever known. I’m happy for her to have this kind of stability. Her mother still lives there to this day.
I stayed in three different places in my four years at university, and with different roommates. Then, upon securing my first job, I moved out of the state and settled into an apartment, staying in the same apartment for the entire 4 years I lived in that area. It was a place to lounge around on weekends. It was a place where I could collect mail, laundry, and dirty dishes, and have the pleasure of doing them without anyone else to nag me. It was safe. I still have fond memories of that apartment, and I count it among one of my “real” homes.
Later, after my husband and I got married, we settled into a new apartment back in our childhood state. After 3 years, I started getting restless and we looked for a house. I was on a 4-year pattern then. After a few years, I’d start to get the bug to move, and I’d start looking.
For our first house, I included my husband upfront in that house search. That would not be the case for our second house. We lived in a lovely starter house the first time. It was given the honorary title of “home”, but so were the hotels I continued to visit for work. And so were both of our parents’ houses. We continued to revisit the argument about how “home” was defined.
After 4 years in that first house, one Sunday night I declared to my husband after he was away for a weekend (and I could conveniently check out some new construction areas) that we were moving to a new house further north. He was surprised but had gotten used to my declarations by then. I would eventually call that second house “home”, too.
Nowadays, when people ask me where I call home, my mind automatically translates their question to “where do you live?” It’s easier to use that to formulate a socially acceptable answer that doesn’t require any follow-up questions. I usually start my response with “my husband and I live in…”
But if I were to take a moment to think about what “home” is, my mind wanders. I remember a two-story townhome where my father and his fiancée lived and our very first dog. I used to throw dog toys on the stairs and our dog would fetch them and we would play tug-of-war.
I think about lazy summer days at my grandparents’ house on a lake where I would fish and write and read to my heart’s content. I was shipped up there every summer to get out of my parent’s hair. Those were my best childhood memories.
I think about spending the night in a family friend’s van on the side of the road when I would travel with them out of town. It was so hot and sticky. We only had Diet Pepsi to drink in the van and we couldn’t brush our teeth. We had to potty on the side of the road because there was no toilet.
I think about the low-income apartments my father and I lived in that got constantly broken into. They would steal my father’s loose change that he collected in a large, plastic water jug.
I think about the house where I spent most of my childhood and how it was caked with my father’s cigarette smoke and dog hair. My mattress had fleas in it because I let the dogs sleep with me in my bed.
I think about my first apartment living on my own and how, during October, before the first snowfall I could half-open a window and it would cool my apartment down completely within an hour because it was so cold. I would sometimes bake an entire cake in my tiny oven there and eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with no one to tell me it was wrong.
I think about the one-bedroom apartment my husband and I first lived in after our wedding and how my parents and half-sister used to cram into it when they came to visit. My parents used to sleep on an air mattress in the dining room, and my half-sister on the couch. And how, when my husband and I got our very first house, it never felt quite as fun as that apartment where we would shove onto the three-seater couch and laugh while playing video games.
I think about the two houses my husband and I have shared with our dogs. And how two of our babies, our “children”, have passed in those homes.
The definition of Merriam-Websters that I prefer is number three in their list: “a familiar or usual setting.” What’s most familiar to me at the moment is what I call home. I can’t help it.
Maybe that will change one day.
Or maybe it won’t. I still make the mistake of using “home” incorrectly. But now my husband is less upset about it, and sometimes turns it into an inside joke.
Resources
Merriam-Webster’s definition of “home”: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/home