What is ‘home’?

A word everyone can describe, yet no one can find the words for.

Driving through the town you grew up in, but haven’t lived in for over 15 years, is a unique experience. It is unlike anything else. Streets and houses are familiar, yet unknown. Time tends to stand still, yet everyone has moved on without you.

The word ‘home’ means the same, yet something completely different to each of us. Many would agree that ‘home’ is the place we live in. Yet most will have experienced not ‘feeling at home’ in said place. So what exactly is ‘home’?

a peculiar aspect of ‘home’ and ‘feeling at home’: while everyone initially agrees that we know what it is to feel at home, the moment we have to describe what it means to us, we begin to stutter. Feeling at home, then, is one of those emotions that eludes words.¹

Unsplash, by Charlie Deets

It was my best friend’s birthday recently. She lives several hours away, one town over from where I grew up. I don’t manage to visit her every year, as your 30s are somehow filled with weddings, divorces, births, work, and renovating. Seeing each other has become a rare occasion, a treat we aren’t able to enjoy every time we would like. This year her birthday was on a Friday, a perfect excuse to finish work early and embark on the three-hour car ride. And because the German Autobahn resembles a labyrinth of construction sites every summer break, three hours quickly turned into five. I spent the ride listening to music, stopped at McDonald’s for fries and Diet Coke, and survived with an aching back and a coffee stain on my shirt.

When a colleague asked me what my weekend plans were, I told her that I was going ‘home’ to see my family. It felt like a lie, even though it wasn’t one.

To me, the word ‘home’ is more layered than it is to most people. What exactly is ‘home’? Is it a place? The town you grew up in? A feeling? People you call family?

Ever since I was a kid, whenever friends said ‘I’m going home’ at the end of a playdate, I wondered what the word ‘home’ actually meant. I knew what my friends were saying, of course, that they were going back to the house they lived in. To them, a house apparently meant ‘home’.

To me, it never was that easy. Yes, I had a house that I called ‘home’, but only because everyone else used the word like that. Not because it felt right.

When I started reading books and became the bookworm I am today, I learned what the word ‘home’ is supposed to mean. According to Merriam-Webster ‘home’ is:

• one’s place of residence.

• a house.

• the social unit formed by a family living together.

• a familiar or usual setting.

• a place of origin.

But somehow, I felt that the word had to mean more. Because when we went on our first school trip in third grade, a girl in my class was incredibly homesick. She cried herself to sleep every night. To her, ‘home’ was more than a place; it was a feeling of belonging to something or someone not in the same place as her. Her crying like that confused me.

At first, I felt sad for her, for not being independent enough.

Then I felt sad for myself, for never having felt like that.

That experience added another complicated layer to this seemingly normal word, one that even now, decades later, makes me wonder what it actually means. It probably means something different to different people. And maybe no one ever spends as much time thinking about the meaning of a word like that, but I still can’t let it go.

The way people talk when they use the word tells me a great deal. Most say it with a fond tone in their voice, a slight smile on their face, and an overall positive attitude. ‘Home’ equals something good to most. ‘Home’ is also something everyone has some associations to, whether they currently have a physical ‘home’ they live in or not, the word will conjure up some memories, past and present.

To some, ‘home’ is the childhood house they grew up in, or their hometown. To others, it is the apartment they live in right now. People who move around a lot refer to their families as ‘home’, others say they carry ‘home’ in their hearts. To me it is all, and yet none of that.

My friend and I have known each other for well over 15 years. We grew up together and have shared all of the painful coming-of-age experiences everyone has to go through. While similar in attitude toward life, we are polar opposites in the way we actually live our lives. She has lived in the same town since birth, and only ever moved a few streets away from her parent’s house. I, however, couldn’t leave that place fast enough. As soon as the school bell rang for the last time, I was out of there. First I moved two hours away, later three. And if I hadn’t met my husband I probably would have left the country by now.

To her, ‘home’ is the place she grew up in, surrounded by the people she calls family. For her, the word ‘home’ hasn’t changed in her 34 years on this earth. ‘Home’ is this constant in her life, an unwavering feeling of belonging.

To me, ‘home’ is this concept that I am painfully aware of, yet somehow still searching for. It feels like I somehow lost the most integral part of being human. To add to the confusion, I do own a house, a beautiful place that I poured all my heart and money into. A place my husband and I have created for ourselves, a safe haven we love. My husband is my ‘home’. This house is my ‘home’.

Yet I still cry myself to sleep sometimes feeling homesick like my classmate on that school trip in third grade.

Driving through the streets of my hometown, streets I know like the back of my hand, I felt like I was doing this thing wrong. This was nothing like all the Christmas movies let me believe, where the main character is always hit with this positive sense of nostalgia. They just love being there. Even through the screen, you can feel this sense of belonging.

But I don’t belong. And to be completely honest, I never belonged there.

I was an open-minded girl, trapped in a close-minded town. A town that believes that a perfectly shaped hedge is more important than your own happiness. A town where you never dare ‘step out of line’, vote liberal, be anything other than catholic, or have less than 2.5 children.

As I was driving along the main street, past the gas station and the pharmacy, driving towards the church ringing its bells in time for mass, I realized how deeply unhappy I was there.

This wasn’t the first time I came to that realization, but this time hit the hardest. Because I want this to be the place I belong. I want my family’s house to feel like ‘home’. But a house in which you were forced to follow rules that never made sense, to neither my teenage nor grown self, can never feel like a ‘home’.

Is it possible to have a ‘home’, yet still miss one?

In an interview with poet Aria Aber, the journalist raises the question: “How do you write about mourning a home you can only imagine?”. I am no refugee, nor an immigrant, yet I can strangely relate to mourning a ‘home’ I’ve never lived in. I mourn the loss that is an unhappy childhood. The loss of never having had parents who cared. The loss of a time that is supposed to be filled with love and laughter, not tears and sadness.

If my life would go up in flames, I would be it. A one-woman show having to piece together a life. Don’t worry, I can do it with a broken heart. I’ve done it before. Many times.

But I would give everything to never having to do that ever again. I want to have this sense of belonging to a place that instantly puts you at ease. To have this safe haven that you can return to, filled with loving memories and people.

That’s why it always feels like a lie when I say that I am going ‘home’. Yes, the house I live in is my ‘home’, for all intents and purposes. But it is a ‘home’ I had to create, by myself, through sweat and tears, and laughter and joy. Given all the places and people I’ve called ‘home’ over the course of my life, there isn’t a singular ‘home’ for me to return to. My being comes from a complicated and disconnected map of places. My ‘home’ is nowhere. It is a loss, like this hole in my heart that never manages to heal. It has scabbed over, scarred heavily, but it is still there. It still hurts and weighs on me: this longing for a place I’ve never known.

Writers on the meaning of ‘home’

To most, a ‘home’ seems to be people and pets they love, or a comfortable place filled with happy memories. Some describe ‘home’ as a fleeting, but perfect moment. Others say “that they feel ‘at ease’ when they feel at home, that they feel ‘safe’, ‘secure’ and ‘comfortable’, at ‘one with their surroundings’.”

Literature has tried to describe the meaning of ‘home’ many times. Alain de Botton says that “we need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances.”

Jeanette Winterson, however, says that a home can be created through, what she calls “private magic”. Where we “invest ordinary objects with talismanic power, something children do all the time, and adults forget how to do at all.”

And despite growing literature on the meaning of ‘home’, none of this explains how you can miss a ‘home’ you never had. How not having a ‘home’ feels like you’ve been robbed of your instincts.

French philosopher Simone Weil probably summed it up best: “To be rooted, is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

Arriving back at my house, it felt good being in a familiar place, surrounded by all the people and things that I love. Yet, this sense of belonging, this gap of ‘home’ in my heart, remained. But what I do realize now is that this gap, this hole, has become less painful over time. While I should have never needed to create a ‘home’ all by myself, as young as I had to, I have learned to find beauty and a sense of ‘home’ in almost everything.

Maybe that is the reason I have survived as long as I have. Finding peace on a rainy morning with a great cup of coffee. Watching Finding Nemo or Twilight, listening to Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter, painting, or writing while a thunderstorm is rolling in. All of these moments are home, a safe haven to return to when life gets too much.

Maybe that is also the reason I have never moved as often as others. Desperate for a place to call ‘home’ I stuck it out in apartments for as long as I could, including horrible roommates, mold, and insect infestations.

But maybe the sense of ‘home’ changes with life; through experiences, people, and heartbreak. Coming home now, looks and feels completely different than years ago. Where it was a fleeting moment of peace and a crappy apartment before, today it is people with a smile on their faces welcoming me home after a five-hour car ride.

XOXO
Annika

1. From “The Politics of Home” by Jan Willem Duyvendak.