There’s no place like home… is there

Recently my son expressed disappointment that he has no childhood home, to return home to. He was lamenting the fallout from the lack of stability he experienced in his childhood.

His words made me sad. Memories of tough times are hard, but sometimes it’s important to dip into our past to help us understand and learn.

What is home? Is it the building we live in now, or the house and place where we grew up?

We can have more than one home, right?

Home is where our heart is, in our place of abode, wherever that is at this moment in our globally transient lives. And it may also be in the past, nestled in memories – or longings – for a deliciously stable and lasting family home; the place where we started out, where we came from, where we belong.

This may be a sensitive topic at the moment with so many people losing their homes in the Australian bushfires. Sadly there’s always a disaster of some sort happening in the world, with people losing their homes in earthquakes, floods, cyclones, and wars, as well as from social or family breakdowns.

If we lose our home in a disaster it causes great upheaval. On top of the logistical and financial stress, if we have a sentimental attachment to it we feel an awful heartache.

But a home is just ‘bricks and mortar’ right? Despite the costs, it may be possible to rebuild. Or we might find another.

If poems and songs like Take Me Home Country Road, Our House and The Green Green Grass of Home are anything to go by, home is much more than that.

It’s not just bricks and mortar that hold our hearts – it’s also the patch of dirt they’re built on, the street and neighbourhood they reside in, and the memories they hold. It is said that the walls of a home can tell stories.

Our sense of stability and our vital need for groundedness can be met by us living in or having such a home.

My friend posted the other day about her home. For nearly four decades it has witnessed and embraced her family’s ups and downs, laughs and spats, love and losses. She is so connected to her home that she feels it is part of her: its weathered timber walls have fused with the edges of the skin that encases her body. She’ll need to be carried out of it in a box, she wrote. What a beautiful connection she’s created after many years building on solid foundations.

But what if we moved around a lot, and don’t know where home is? Or have no connection to a particular home? What if our lives traversed so many windy tracks and intersections that we lost sight of the breadcrumbs and pebbles we dropped along the way to guide us home.

My life didn’t give me a lasting childhood home. By the time I was 17, my family had moved nine times, and I’d attended nine schools. The longest we lived anywhere was about three or four years.

Probably the biggest move was when I was six, and we left Holland to come to Australia. I started school in the middle of term, when I barely spoke a word of English.

Some schools I went to for a few years, and some for just six months. During my high school years I went to three state schools and two private colleges.

Studies show that moving house is one of the biggest stresses people can go through. For a child that stress is about changing schools and friends. Each time my family moved, I went through the sadness of saying goodbye to friends, and the challenges of trying to make new ones and fitting in. I was often teased as an unwanted outsider. Sometimes I was a novelty, and both nice and horrible children befriended me. I tried hard to be likeable and for other kids to accept me, and perhaps this became a flaw in my personality growing up.

I often became fond of the area we lived in. When we were in the country I loved walking endlessly on my own in nature, or riding my pony. When in the suburbs I rode my bike around, or walked my dog along the beach. Perhaps the instability also helped develop an independent nature and a contentedness with my own company.

When I was 14, we moved from countryside Victoria back to the suburbs, and I didn’t want to lose my pony. So on the weekends I rode my bike, alone, to the train-station, took my bike on the train that went to Melbourne city, there I changed trains and got on one heading to the country, and then rode to the paddock where my pony was. After a day of riding and hanging out with the people there, I returned home the same way, by train and bike. At just 14 years old! My, how times have changed.

Sure, my parents paid for my pony’s care, and I was privileged, and now I know that it helped develop other strengths in me such as adaptability, resilience, and flexibility. From every difficulty or negative comes a positive! But as a young teenager I didn’t recognise this; instead I felt the upheaval and the inconsistency. A few months later when we moved to Queensland, I cried once again as I waved goodbye to the friends I’d not long made. Back then I wrote snail-mail letters to friends I left behind, but most kids didn’t like writing as much as I did, and the correspondence was always short-lived.

Another move happened when I was halfway through Grade 12. That time I refused to change schools. I’d already struggled through different curriculums and a lack of continuity of subjects and teachers. I didn’t want to jeopardise my final exams. So my parents bought a small second-hand car and at 17 years old I drove myself to school each day from the Gold Coast to Brisbane. The next year, shortly after I left home, my parents moved again.

In the many years since then, when I visit my mum, it’s really lovely to be with her in her home, and her door is always open to me… but it is her place, not my old home. I never lived there. There are no deep roots entwined in the woodwork, no beautiful old trees that we planted together, no treasure trove of memories. About 10 years ago she finally got rid of a coffee table she’d brought over from Holland. It was one of the last tangible remnants from my childhood and I miss it. That in itself shows how important enduring touchstones can be.

Perhaps that’s quite common these days, in our world of global travel and people shifting jobs and homes so often, and marriages breaking down. Perhaps it’s no big deal; I’m certainly not alone in this experience, and I try to focus on the positive mental and emotional qualities that resulted from such a childhood. I understand how lucky I am to have had the diversity of experiences that came from living in different areas, meeting different people, and participating in a myriad of different extracurricular activities in a host of different communities (even if I did become a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none!).

But, sometimes I feel sad about it. Like just a few weeks ago when I heard Chris Rea sing Driving Home for Christmas. I distinctly felt a strong twinge of homesickness. It welled up and twisted deep inside my gut. 

But, homesickness? For which home? Which country? A childhood innocence? A fairytale? A misunderstood emptiness…

And I felt sad when my son shared his feelings about having no home to call home.

I did try to provide the opposite. For 13 years my ex-husband and I lived in the same place, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere in my life. In a tiny house in the quiet countryside. I think that was great for my kids! I wanted them to have a stable upbringing, consistent parenting, and for them to make lifelong friends and feel part of a community. But sadly I’d repeated history and married an unreliable man. Living on acreage became untenable. We moved to the Gold Coast where I’d luckily found a decent job close to family. The process of resettling meant we lived in four different homes during the next few years. My son changed schools three times. Life at home was chaotic and far from nurturing or supportive for teenagers finding their way.

And so, like me, my children have no home to go back to where our ‘old bedroom’ still is, and where we have memories of family gatherings, schoolyard shenanigans, roaming around the neighbourhoodand playing in the streets. Where our grandparents’ home is still around the corner, with its verandah out the front and an old rocking chair making us feel like we belong.

Now my home is a small bungalow in Indonesia. My partner Made, born into a large Hindu family, has a completely different life experience. When we go to visit his home village in Lombok, even though his parents also divorced, almost every person we bump into – in the street, in the market, in every shop, restaurant and office – is either related to him, went to school with him, or has just known him since he was born. He reaps the benefits of a lifetime of regular, deep-rooted homecomings. I can’t even imagine what that feeling of connectedness, of belonging, of dependability and stability is like.

Do you have family homes where your old sporting trophies are still displayed in glass cabinets? Where posters of your favourite bands still hang on bedroom walls and old family photos sit on the mantelpiece? And where, when you walk down the street you see old neighbours who watched you grow up?

Are you blessed to be able to go home to a house where your parents are still enjoying each other’s company?

Or is that just a lucky few. Or an old fashioned fantasy!

My kids have now moved overseas as well. Both of them married partners from stable homes and families. This warms my heart 💙. The year before last I was blessed to spend Christmas with both of them, at my son-in-law’s family home in Wales – in the house where he grew up, in the town where he went to school. This year both of them enjoyed a warm and loving Christmas at their spouses’ family homes, at opposite ends of the world to me.

Instability can create a load of baggage we carry around like a Santa sack. I guess in the end we need to find a way to come to terms with that, and take the good with the bad. It can be a slow process to try to lift its load from our shoulders.

For me home will always evoke a mish-mash of emotions. As you might have guessed from the messy feelings I’ve shared in this blog! But despite all the upheaval and lack of stability in both my childhood and then my married life, I believe my home is wherever I lay my hat. And that’s fine as an independent adult.

As parents it’s our role to provide a loving and stable home for our children. Sadly, life doesn’t always work out that way. Maybe we have to accept that as one of those ‘such is life’ facts of life.

Or maybe not. Maybe we need to acknowledge when we stuff up, and try to support improvements in society to change things for the better, so that more families thrive and less struggle and collapse.

At my home I meet young couples from all over the world who give me immense hope and confidence, just like my children do; the younger generations seem so much more conscious and wise! 

Wouldn’t life be grand if we could all build a loving home – whatever that means to you and even if it is a rebuilt one or if it changes locality – that is still there for our children when their kids want to drive ‘home’ for Christmas.