Home is Where…
Home is where?
It’s where the heart is, the love, the laughter, and the personal growth.
Home is also where the plumber comes to visit, and the electrician needs to make five trips back, and the people whom you’ve been paying to make your home nicer keep coming back + back, and back again. “I thought we were done with this?” you ask yourself, just before you add one, no wait, two more projects to the list for them.
It’s where one of your old dogs has thrown up on the carpet again. Oh, they also got ill in the freshly painted hallway, but hey! now you can see it really well when cleaning it up because of those new lights that were installed. You realized it was a real problem when they also vomited in your car, the kitchen, and just a little bit in your bedroom… but you don’t notice that one until your sock is wet with sick, and you let the cuss words fly as you hobble down the hallway on your way to the washing machine.
It’s where you watched your furry friends, then years younger, fly up and down that same hallway. This was before even the idea of a custom picture rail had been born, when then middle-age pups still somehow had the raw energy of youth. It’s where you see vivid+visceral moments of their inner light growing dimmer, and you notice one day as the sun catches those puggle faces, that their eyes are so cloudy now. It’s the place where they shake more often for reasons you just can’t seem to pinpoint, or control. You humans in the house all do your best to keep them comfortable, but it can be truly difficult and heartbreaking to watch something limp towards the final days of this version of its life here on Earth. You simultaneously can’t imagine life without them, and ask yourselves when this part will end, because you simply can’t see how you’ll manage riding this emotional rollercoaster of will they/won’t they be around tomorrow, one. more. time. You and your spouse remember them when all of you were fifteen+ years younger, and living mostly off of hamburger helper, midwestern fall energy, and wild love.
It’s where you raise your voice in laughter around the dinner table, only to find yourself moments later raising it in frustration. It’s where you’ve come to learn that the facade of control, this, “orderly world of home” life has these dependent beings in it, and they explore the world in ways that you find inconveniently messy at times.
It’s where your incredible human child makes detailed paper eels, with moving mouths, and special designs for each eel eye. It’s where they ask for hugs, and you ask: if their teeth are brushed, did they pee before getting their shoes on, and do they want another almond butter sando, or are they good to go? It’s where you’ve watched your spouse hold them with a tenderness you’ve never been able to witness from the outside with your own eyes before, but that you know well internally, because they’ve shared it with you for the last twenty-two. It’s where you get to watch the building of a foundation between the two people you would literally dive in front of a speeding anything to save, as they forge a bond that will stand the tests of time and life. Home is where you find out that a friend is very sick, and a co-worker lost the bidding war for the house they dreamed of, and where you read that email that gave you gut churn for an entire month. Home is where you decide the email sender must either have a) zero empathy, or b) have no idea what it’s like to be a two-female led household (with dependents), who try their best not to just keep their heads above water, but who dare to want more/better/the best for themselves and those they love, in a world/society that is still dominated by white cishet men like the email-sender.
Home is interesting, because it means something different for each person. It’s often where you hope, laugh, argue and grow. Even when your home has been “remodeled”, at the core, it will always be a weathered cradle of safety and security that gently holds the heartbeats of you+yours, as you close your eyes for sleep each night.
Being “back home” this week has reminded me, not so gently, that life is a series of ebbs+flows, ups+downs, highs+lows. Unlike in the movies or a daydream fantasy, the “good and the bad”, the “happy and the sad”, they don’t go one, then the other, but hand-in-hand together.
This week I’m holding space for my family, and all of you out there as we go through transitional stages, and ride the rollercoaster that is our human lives.