'Home'

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past while about the concept of ‘home;’ how we put together the places that contain our lives, our families, the stuff that defines us, where we go to be with the ones we love, or where we go to be alone. I think about how we feel about those places we’re told we ‘belong.’ ‘Home,’ for many of us, is an ever-changing thing, whether it’s by choice or by circumstance. Where we live doesn’t always feel like home, and sometimes ‘home’ can be a world away. ‘Home’ for me has always been a complicated thing. There have been many times in my life when I’ve felt displaced, like an uprooted tree that hasn’t yet got a grip in its new soil. And while I have found ‘home’ in unexpected places (alone in Paraguayan apartments, in busy hostels on hidden street corners, in rundown houses in a town I never thought I’d end up in) other times places where I’ve planned to make home have tossed me right back out (I could have been a well-established West-Coast hippie by now.) What makes ‘home’ is different for all of us; for some it’s defined by how we make it, for some it’s who we make it with, and for others it’s why we’re there. I can think of a number of significant shifts in my life that transformed what ‘home’ was for me, and often these movements were accompanied by a pretty significant crisis of self. The first time, when I was 9-years-old, my family moved to a new house. I kept the same neighbourhood, the same school, the same routine. And yet I was consumed by an unexplainable anxiety that seemed to paralyze me. While all I wanted was to get out and go back, I couldn’t bring myself to leave this new strange so-called ‘home.’ I had to adjust; figure out how to fit in to this new place.
             Almost a decade later, when I turned 18, I moved to Vancouver to live, for the first time, independently at university. But it never felt right; I started suffering from persistent migraines and couldn’t relax. I loved my roommate, met some amazing people who are still dear friends. But for whatever reason I didn’t belong there and I knew it, and within a year I was here in Guelph living in a dilapidated student house on a street filled with dilapidated student houses, and I felt more at home there than I had felt anywhere in years.

Another decade, and I owned my first home that I never felt at home in. And coming ‘home’ after J.J. died was a strange and confusing thing. Before moving to my childhood home in Toronto for those two months he was hospitalized, my house in Guelph never really felt like home. It was where I lived, where we chose to live, where we brought home our daughter. It was where we established ourselves and our family, where we settled down. And yet it never felt right. I was always eager to spend time away, visiting family, travelling, getting up north. Returning from those trips was always a paradox of returning home-not-home, and to this day I still can’t quite explain it. When my first daughter was born I spent mat leave crawling out of my skin, starving to get away from this house and panicked if I had nowhere to go. I felt so isolated here alone with her, so cut off from my world and those things that defined me.  When J.J. went into the hospital in 2016 we thought we’d be gone for a few weeks—a month tops. I was relieved to be getting out of here, to go somewhere ‘safe’ where he would be taken care of and I, in my childhood home, could feel more at ease. But what is interesting to me is how, as those weeks turned into months, my sense of ‘home’ began to shift until it inverted entirely and all I wanted was to get back here. It would make sense to think that coming back home after J.J. died would have been a sad and scary thing. I’ll admit that as I packed up our things and hit the road I imagined the moment over and over when I would open the door and walk into this place that we had made together, knowing that he would never step over that threshold again, and I was sure I would burst into tears. But when I finally did step in through this door I was met with relief, and felt, for the first time in months, like I could inhale; I could breathe in this place that had, for so long, made me desperately claustrophobic. The house hadn’t changed but I had. It wasn’t really ‘home’ for I the Wife, but it has been a refuge for I Alone. And now that home I grew up in, the place where I believed I would always run to when times were hard, has become a difficult place, full of traps and snares in the closet corners and bathroom sinks, and on kitchen counters and basement walls; in the soap that, when I smell it, transports me to morning showers before heading to the hospital, those shirts still hanging in the closet that, if I close my eyes for a moment, still smell like him, in the juicer that we used daily in desperate attempt to fill him with vitamins to keep him strong, and in the fireplace that kept us toasty warm in those nights leading up to his surgery, and then in those many nights I lay on the couch praying that he would wake up and text me back.

Much has changed here in this I Alone House since I first stepped back in without J.J. New rooms, new furniture, new art, new people. For a long time I left his things where they lay, and over time they’ve been moved, sorted, and much has been given away. My I Alone house has become an expression of myself and my life and the things that I love, the memories he helped me to create and the memories I have created without him. I still, at times, feel that strange sense of uprootedness. In particular, I find it hard to return from time away—whether that be a visit to Toronto or a vacation away. Interestingly, while that first return without J.J. was a relief, subsequent homecomings have felt strange and unsettling. This New Year was no exception, and as we travelled back to Canada I could feel my sense of trepidation at the return to an empty house, alone with my kids. But, maybe with time, that too will change. This past trip, while riding in the car back into the city, I turned my phone over and over in my hand, fidgeting anxiously, when I received a perfectly timed message from a friend. “Welcome home!” it read. “Home,” I thought to myself, “I belong somewhere.”