Somewhere in the middle of March, the five of us who have relocated to an antique house in Connecticut were sitting around the kitchen counter remembering that three years ago the world kind of tilted wildly. Mike came home unexpectedly from a job that had kept him in Las Vegas for weeks. Stephen stayed home instead of returning to school after spring break. Patrick and Lexi came to stay for awhile. Even Bobby made his way to our house. He came singing “Closing Time” and stayed until we left for the closing of the Connecticut house. We were eleven of us under roof, I think.
“Those were the very best days ever,” said Katie, with stars in her eyes.
I gulped, scoffed, and looked at Mike wordlessly, a puzzle playing between my eyebrows. “Why?”
“We were so together all the time. No one had to leave for dance or soccer. We did a million puzzles. We took walks every day, just because, not going anywhere.”
Sarah caught the happy memory wave. “We made short videos with Stephen. And they were smart and funny and that’s when he and I really became friends.”
“And remember? Stephen planned that whole prom in the sunroom with Oscar because Katie was going to move and she’d never get to go to prom…” offered Karoline.
“Yeah,” Katie said, barely audible. “I still can’t figure that one out. Stephen didn’t exactly like me for my whole life before that.”
I caught Mike’s eye and whispered, “I remember realtors, and lenders, missing appraisals, rapidly changing lending guidelines, cleaning like my life depended on it, and getting rid of half our possessions.”
“I remember fixing the living room ceiling and having to find movers the day before settlement because ours bailed because the driver had been exposed to Covid,” he offered.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “You fixed the ceiling and I spent an entire day listening to a whole novel and gently removing teeny tiny paint splatters from the floor.” (He insisted he didn’t need a dropcloth.)
I remember crying a lot and sleeping very little. And I also remember thinking that if we didn’t have to move during lockdown, I would have loved lockdown. I remember thinking I would have tried to make lockdown so fun for my kids.
Katie continued, “Remember when we had no kitchen furniture left, so we all just sat on the kitchen floor because it seemed like that was still the place to be?” I do remember that. I have a picture of it somewhere, but those pictures seem to have evaporated.
“And the house was so clean all the time. Absolutely perfect, all the time. Because it had to be, because you never knew when someone was going to want to see it. It was so nice all the time.”
I definitely remember that part. I remember both the strain and the way I poured obsessive energy into that level of perfection.
Sarah offered, “Remember how Bobby kept trying to make us remember things that actually happened before we were born?”
“Remember how sad Bobby was?” I whispered again to Mike. “And I wept with him and thought my heart would break for him…” Bobby had come “home”—because home wasn’t going to be in that space anymore, and because his wife had announced she was finished being married.
I remember the strain, the worry, the sleeplessness. I remember trying so incredibly hard to move home from one place to another. The effort was so intense that I was at home in neither place for a very long time.
What could possibly be more important? Surely, this was the work of my life.
But the girls remember an idyllic respite between their Virginia world and the new Connecticut world. A short season when they were truly, truly home. Safe. Happy together. Knit together as a family community. And it was good.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
I’m back in Virginia for a week. Nick had urgent, unexpected surgery right after Easter, so we are spending the Octave together camped out in Mary Beth’s apartment. She lives in a little historic rural village in western Loudoun. And boy, is it in full bloom! I’ve been enchanted with the beauty of New England these past couple of years. Now, I remember how utterly lovely Virginia is.
I’ve made frequent trips to the grocery store for gelato and Italian ice and whatever else he thinks he might be able to swallow. It is a grocery store exactly like the one in our Virginia neighborhood. I know exactly where everything is. For the most part, Connecticut grocery stores are small and dark; the ceilings are low and the stock is limited. It’s so weird. It’s like a time warp. The grocery store here is big and bright and fully stocked with absolutely everything. It feels like such a luxury. I go to the self-checkout and key in my old phone number and the voice says, “Welcome valued customer.” I feel oddly—um—welcomed. Just for kicks, I left the checkout the first day and drove through Chick-Fil-A. There I was assured by two different people that serving me (with a smile) was, in their words, “my pleasure.” People smile and wave as they pass in their cars when I walk the puppy. There’s something about the south…
Am I home? Or did I leave home behind? I can’t figure it out. This place is familiar. I don’t have to stop to think in order to force my brain to make connections. The connections come in a rush. Memories anchor me, and I feel myself relax because, frankly, I think the effort to feel at home somewhere new has been a bit exhausting.
But, Connecticut is home now, too. We have made lifelong friends there—the kind of people we know will always be a part of our lives. There are familiar patterns now. We have people in Connecticut. And my girls love it there beyond my wildest imagining. Surely that is home.
What is home for my kids? I think it might depend on the kid. And some of those kids have not been children for a long time. When do we stop spending much time at all considering how our creation of home continues to affect them?
What exactly makes something a good core experience that makes one think “home”? Apparently, it can happen in a pandemic when I’m thoroughly preoccupied. I used to think that holidays were key and that it was very important to try to gather as many of us in and to anchor the experience in traditions. Recent conversations make me think that might have been a misperception on the scale of thinking furniture was necessary in the kitchen during quarantine. Maybe dumping the old holidays into a different setting feels like a dark, crowded, low-ceilinged grocery store.
It sounds like maybe home is a thought that each of us thinks for ourselves, and no one else can construct it for us.
Maybe mothering is simply pouring the best you can into raising them, and then trusting that they will nurture the relationships and the spaces that make a home. I’m not sure. When you do that, be sure not to pour yourself dry. You do no good that way. You’ll need to have a good reserve left for what comes next.
I know that I’ve learned so much these last three years about adult “children,” about endeavoring to raise children in faith, about investing wholeheartedly into home education and mothering at home and looking at life when that season comes to a close. Gracious! It turns out 2020 marked the end and the beginning of so much inside my head and in my environment! I definitely did not see that coming.
When I had a house full of small children, I tried so hard to do all the right things (and to figure out what all the right things were). So much of my parenting philosophy was driven by wanting to give my children the childhood I wish I’d had and being the mother I wanted growing up. I think I believed that raising children was an input->output equation. Pour enough of yourself and enough unconditional love into a kid, make sure he knows Jesus and that you do everything you possibly can to connect his heart with the faith, endeavor to educate him in as much beauty as humanly possible (throwing in heroic dedication to sports or dance), and they’ll grow up ready for whatever life offered and they wanted to pursue. I think I believed I could shape their hearts and souls and minds just so, and all would be well.
They would know love and they would love home. They would know Love and be completely at home in Him. And when we were together, we’d always be home.
And yet.
And yet it is not me who makes home, is it? It is God himself. St. Augustine warned that this is how it would be. Our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.
My heart.
The hearts of my children.
The heart of my husband.
We can and should accompany each other along the journey, but really, each of us travels our own journey Home. And it is the Holy Spirit who ultimately feathers the nest of our souls.
Maybe if we know that we can move with more freedom and less baggage along the road home.
