jedusor | On "home"

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On "home"

So, there's something I don't get.

I've always looked forward to turning eighteen and moving out. My family rocks, but I never had a choice about moving in with them. Besides, moving out is what you do when you grow up, right? You do your own thing, you make your own way in the world, you get your own physical space as well as the space to make your own decisions.

I know I'm not the only person who takes this approach. Sure, there are plenty of people who stay with their families into adulthood, and that's fine if that's how you do things. But there were also plenty of people alongside me throughout adolescence, chomping at the bit to get out of their houses the day they hit eighteen. And some of them--not all, but some--did.

This is not unexpected, is it? As a country, we grant people legal adulthood at eighteen. It shouldn't be a surprise that some of us grab that and run with it. And yet both socially and bureaucratically, it's assumed that young people have a "home" with their parents. Clark refused to accept my college mailbox as my current address; since I now have an off-campus apartment, I called to change it to this one, and they initially refused to change it because it's a "summer residence, not a permanent residence." Financial aid is impossible to get without taking parental income information into account until the student is 25, even if the parents refuse to pay a cent; I know several people who have been thoroughly screwed over by this policy. I can't count the number of people who have asked whether I'm "going home" for a school break or for the summer, and telling them that I live here only gets a confused "I thought you were from California?"

It's not just college students, either. I hear real grownups with houses and kids and everything referring to visiting their parents as "going home." I don't understand. I visit my family members, and I enjoy those visits, but they're visits. When I go to Davis, where I was born and spent my childhood, it's pleasantly familiar as the place I grew up, but it's not home. To me, home is where I go at the end of the day. That was my parents' house, once. Then it was my grandparents' house. Then it was a dorm room. Now it's an apartment in Worcester, Massachusetts, with a couple of near-strangers who seem pretty nice. In the future, it might be my own place, or a place I share with people I love; it might be P's couch in Lyon, if I ever manage to get my butt across the Atlantic; it might even be an actual house of my own someday, unlikely as settling down feels to me now. But "home" doesn't mean someplace far away that I only see once or twice a year, and it seems very strange to me that that's what others expect it to mean.

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Home for me is a mutable concept. When i am at work, or on vacation, going home means going to my current home. But, for a really long time, i would refer to going to my parent's house as 'going home', as well. Knowing which home i referred to was somewhat contextual. (I will note, now that my parents no longer live in my childhood home, going to their house is no longer going 'home'.)

I still think of Connecticut as one of my homes, and Pittsburgh is definitely one of my homes. Seattle, strangely, feels less compelling to me, although my particular house is definitely my home.

Home is conceptual, i think. Feeling at home can be separable from location. I suspect that many people feel that way.

The school logistics, however, is just dumb.

"Home" for me is both my room in college and my room (*not* the rest of the house) in Castle Ward. I expect that when I'm in Switzerland it will change from room-in-college to room-in-Switzerland (though I note that I expect college-central-site to continue feeling like "home" for, well, ever).

Which I think is a way of saying that "home" is a place that feels safe and a place that is "mine", and "mine" doesn't really need to mean anything other than familiarity (so some areas of Cambridge are less "home" than the six miles of Cornish coastal path that I know like the back of my hand). Erm. Make sense? Probably not. Lagrange multipliers eating my BRAINZ.

No, that makes perfect sense. I guess the Bay Area in California feels kind of like home, even though I've never really actually lived there. But even then, it's more "a place where I feel I belong, and might someday have a home" than "home."

Okay, how about: for me, familiarity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for "home"-feelings.

(I have realised that this is a more accurate way to put it, and furthermore that I will find expressing it in maths helpful [not just because I'm doing maths papers at the moment!]. Also, there's a chance you'll think it's cute. :p)

The probability of me finding any given thing you do cute is significantly greater than .5. ♥

My home is not a place. My home is people.
~ Lois McMaster Bujold, in the novel Barrayar

That's a sentiment I've heard expressed a lot, and I can understand how other people might feel that way. But to me, home isn't about anyone besides myself. I've learned not to rely on other people too much when it comes to the really important things.

Home for me is where my parents are. For some strange reason it's also tied to that pink house in the 'burbs, with concrete in the backyard, the dying maple, the cherry tree and that pathetic little hill by the pond. I know it isn't logical and I have often wondered why I feel this way.

I wish I could feel as you do. I wonder if it is a culture thing for me? I know white American parents sometimes re-do their children's rooms when their kids move out, but my parents have kept mine.

Did you move a lot when you were younger? My best friend has been all around the world, and her idea of home is something like yours.

Anyway! Thanks for this post.

I stayed in the same town in California until I was thirteen. Then I moved to Kansas City, which never felt like home at all, then to a different part of California with my grandparents for a year, then I came out here. I'd think that any homey feelings would have been established before I moved away from California the first time, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that none of my family lives in my hometown anymore.

My room became my brother's immediately after I moved out, and they've moved house a couple times since then. But I never felt all that attached to that room, anyway. It probably does have a lot to do with how I was raised, but not totally, since my older brother is a lot more emotionally attached to the idea of "home" than I am.

Hey.

Let me preface this by establishing that the older brother in question more or less stopped fitting that description almost half a decade ago.

I feel like I have a very unique view of "home," mostly because of what I've been doing for this past year. I've had more than half a dozen "homes" here in Japan, and I've stayed with countless more families for short durations. This experience (along with our parents splitting up) has warped my idea of home, in that I do not see it as a single place any more. I have many homes. When I go to visit or stay at any of them, I tend to say "going home."

I guess you can still say I am emotionally attached to the idea of home, but that I've come to apply that idea very liberally. I would even consider the cozy little hostel I stayed at for a week in Naha last month a home, it sure felt that way by the time I had to leave. I've got layers of homes; right now I'm staying with a LABO family for one night, while on a trip in southern Kyushu. Next week I go back home to Kurosaki, which is my home away from Tokyo, which is my home away from Dublin, which is my home away from Kansas City, which is my home away from Davis. I feel like a monkey climbing around some sort of bizarre "home" tree, with branches extending around the world.

Strangely enough, I too don't really consider Davis a home anymore. I still consider it my hometown, as funny as that might sound, but there isn't much left for me there. Thinking about it, I consider "home" to be a place that has a bed I can sleep in and people I consider family. (Incidentally, my idea of "family" has undergone similar expansion the last few years.)

Sometimes I envy those who have a single place to call home (usually when I get asked the question, "where are you from?"), but I wouldn't have it any way other than my current situation. Homes are wonderful places, and being able to have a home with you while still traveling the world is a true blessing.

I'm rambling, but hopefully I've gotten across what I was trying to say. One of the other side effects of being here is that I'm not nearly as articulate as I used to be, not to mention it's late and I'm tired.

You know, as cheesy as it sounds, home has always been where my heart is. For a long time it was my parents' house, and even after I'd moved out, I would still refer to their place as "home" (or rather "la maison" which is slightly less heavily connoted than "home", at least for me). When my brother took over my room was when things started feeling less like "home" there for me. It's still familiar, comfortable, and a place I like to go back to when I need to feel safe or something. I will still call it "la maison" occasionally but it's no longer "home" in the sense that there is nothing of me, there. Home is my flat, though not as much as my previous flat was, which is weird considering I actually own this place, lol.

That being said, even when home was my parents' house, home was always where I had managed to build a world of my own. I remember telling my Spanish friend that home was a concept that lived in one's heart more than anything and that that was the reason I felt "at home" in my room at the school we were working at when she was constantly feeling homesick. I also remember telling the same thing to my roommate back when I shared a flat with a friend. In both cases, somehow my room ended being the one room where everybody always converged to sit and chat and just spend a little time hanging out. My friends used to tell me that my room in England was the only room that felt "lived in", which I kept telling them was because to me, it WAS home.

Yeah, I think "the house" and "home" have the same relative levels of connotation in this language. I guess home isn't about stuff and people for me; it's more about where I feel comfortable in my own space. Maybe that's why I feel more homey in my dorm room and here, in this apartment I've lived in for all of a week, than I did with my grandparents or in Kansas City.

You probably know the Robert Frost quote: "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Well, I've always felt lucky to have such a place, which for me is anywhere my brothers and sisters are living, and everywhere that my husband and daughter are, and a couple of other places belonging to a couple of special friends.

It's a great thing that you feel a sense of "home" inside yourself. (I envy you that maturity--when I was your age, I was so terribly homesick during my freshman year of college that I quit school in upstate New York and moved back to Colorado, where my family was.)

Still, by now I know your mom well enough to bet a trillion dollars that, though you don't need it now and may never need it at all, you've still got that other sort of home too--where, should you ever have to go there, they'll gather you in with loving arms and not a moment's pause. And that's a pretty great thing too. But you probably know that.

I do know that, and I didn't mean to sound ungrateful at all. I have many places I would be able to go if I needed help, and I know I'm very lucky for that. But I don't think the esteemed Mr. Frost's definition of "home" quite matches mine. :P

A lot of my friends suffer from homesickness, but I don't. I actually feel a little guilty sometimes for being so comfortable away from my family. But they got me for eighteen years, and I get along way better with them now that I don't live with them anyway.

I've never been much on homesickness. It used to worry me, but, as i got older, i realized that i don't really get homesick because i am secure in what i am currently doing and with the fact that I can go home again.

As an adult i've gotten homesick more than i ever did as a kid - i get homesick for Pittsburgh, when i miss my life and the smells and trees. And sometimes i get homesick for home - but mostly when i'm not entirely happy with my decision to have left at that particular time.

Madeleine is not a clingy child - she liked to wander afar, and talk to folks. I consider this to be a great triumph - i don't think kids feel okay wandering unless they first feel secure and safe.

That's pretty much Mom's philosophy, too. I was a cuddly kid, but I also wasn't afraid to run off and do my own thing.

Let's see ... my parents divorced when I was young, so I had two homes that I alternated living in, growing up. My mom and I moved on several occasions as well--I probably had lived in about 8 or 9 locations by the time I was 18. I spent about two months living by myself at that time, and although it became a disaster, it was never because I was homesick. I have since lived with my dad.

I don't know that I have any particular attachment to "home", in any of the ways it has been defined in the discussion so far. I like having a place of refuge, but as long as it meets certain basic requirements, I don't much care where or what it is.

My guess is that, if you had continued living in the original house in Davis until you went off to college, and if your family still lived there now, you might be more inclined to feel you were making visits "home". At the end of which you would leave Davis to go "home".

I suspect the college bureaucracy stuff is mostly them wanting to avoid the hassle of frequently-changing addresses. Which isn't to say it's fair.

Well, I lived in the same house in Texas from the time I was 2 years old until I went off to college, with both my parents and my brother, and my mother and brother still live there. I didn't live in three different houses in two different states while growing up; I just lived in the one place, until I went off to college. (Well, except for the month or so at the Math Olympiad Program; my preview of going off to college.) So this remained "home" for quite a while.

During my undergrad days, I lived in 4 different dorm rooms in 2 different locations over 4 years, but only 200 miles away, and "home" was still the house I grew up in. One summer I went home and worked in a grocery store; the next two summers I stayed around school and took better summer jobs there. But I still went home a few times a year: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, and at the beginning and end of the summer.

In grad school, I lived in a cooperative house - for the entire time, in one house, in three different rooms but in one of them for most of my time there. There was much more of a sense of community with the others there, and it was much more "home" for me. I still visited my family, who were still only about 200 miles away, but during this time "home" was becoming more malleable; though I'll always be welcome there, the family house was less and less like the place I grew up and I had much more of a home at college. If I had had the same setup farther away where it wasn't practical to visit a lot, I could very easily have considered the place I lived at college to be my only "home" during these years.

And there was a 6-month internship during this time when I went to Boston and got established in the company I would eventually work for permanently. At this time, it was nearly impossible to rent apartments in Boston for less than a year lease. You could sublet if you found something compatible, but I wasn't well aligned with the cycles for those sort of things, and I was left having to choose between the $1700/month luxury apartments and the tiniest apartments available at around $300/month. There was simply no middle to the market because everybody wanted a year lease and there were enough people able to do that that landlords could afford to ignore the short-term people. And I had to choose the small one since the other was too crazily large a chunk of what I was earning on the internship. (To be fair, it was well maintained, not a shithole, but it was incredibly small.) So that place was only home in the sense of a place I came home to at night.

Finally, when I was done with college and went to Boston again, this time it was clear to everybody it was permanent. While I was able to stay close to home during college, my parents knew I was destined for a better life than they had, climbing a couple notches up the class ladder. Though they would miss me and I them, they had encouraged me to go for it and be willing to move far away if that was required for my success, and so it was, and so I did.

This time, the place I moved to would be my "home", and I was finally completely moving out of the house I grew up in. And I was asked to take all my belongings that I didn't want thrown away - not that I was being kicked out, but that the house was small and they needed the space, and since I was moving halfway across the country, the van taking my stuff would be the last convenient opportunity for me to take any large possessions. And so for the last 10 years I have lived in just two places in the Boston area, and these have been my home, and that other place is my family's house.

I've quit thinking of the place where I grew up as "home," but on the other hand, I don't yet think of any other place as "home" either, or at least not in the same sense I used to think of that place. Sometimes that gets to me a little, but I'm not sure if it really bothers me deep down or just feels like it ought to bother me. And I'm not sure if it's just because I haven't lived in any one dwelling long enough since then, or if there's some essential "homey" ingredient I haven't found yet, or if I just never will feel that deep-down "home" feeling again because it comes with an (illusory?) sense of permanence that you only really have when you're a kid.

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