These walls hold no memories...
on having no place to land
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These walls hold no memories…
and no stories to share with our children…
They carry the memory of the person who once lived here. They will carry us when we leave. Ghosts of nameless, faceless children linger within the rooms my boys now occupy. Their faint fingerprints in the paint. The wobbly shelf in the closet. A small Lego action figure wedged between the carpet and the baseboard.
Memories they once held here will mix with our own, but they won’t hold long…because this is not home. It’s a through station. Something on the way to something else.
This is how it has always been for our little family. The four of us…here for a bit, there for a bit. Never settling. Never staying put.
Home has always been of great interest to me. I have longed for it and often questioned what it meant. Is home a place? A feeling? I spent longer trying to sort my feelings on home than having a home.
I need home to be a place and a feeling. Something that holds what we give it. Something that keeps us safe and protected and drips with love. I want to leave my mark in its walls. I want to stand in it’s rooms and let my mind comb through all the images that space brought me. Right now, every Christmas looks different, every birthday, every summer, everything is different because we were in different spaces.
I have no anchor. No tether that stills me.
I have no home.
As I grow older the yearning for home grows deeper and more animalistic. I NEED a place to mark as my own. It occupies every single part of my being. My children do not have the security of knowing what home is. That place where no matter where you venture off to, this place will be here.
A rental here. A rental there. A rental everywhere.
We have resided in all corners of this state. When the kids were younger, we didn’t think much about how moving from place to place chasing promotion opportunities for my husband…because we were also young. We didn’t think about how important it was for us to establish roots somewhere. And here we are, my husband at the top of chain when it comes to prison job hierarchy as a Warden…and we still don’t know home.
Where we go is no longer within our control. This is in the hands of the State. They can send us wherever, and they have. Four moves in the last year.
I am tired. I am weary.
We have no roots. We have no home. We have no place.
This isn’t the time to point out that there are other occupations my husband can have. We are aware of our ability to choose, but we are also cognizant of our circumstances and those will often dictate our options.
I am sharing to vent. I am sharing for relation. I am sharing for kin within the same place as I am. I am sharing for understanding.
And I am sharing because I am making this year the year that I have a home.
And I will share this journey here. The ups, the downs, the ins, the outs. All of it.
I wrote about putting down roots for years, and each time I began to feel rooted, I was soon yanked up and moved. I resonate with your longing for home and it is also a concept I wrestle with and reckon with...especially now in a bicultural marriage with biracial kids...we will never be able to be in “homes” at the same time, since one is the US and one is Nicaragua. Thanks for sharing, and hugs to you and yours as y’all continue to work it out.
The feeling of home is so visceral. Safety, coziness, privacy, love, and the ability to decide the rules: who enters and who doesn’t, what color the walls are... it represents boundaries and belonging. I didn’t have that growing up, so now I savor it and never take it for granted. But I’m also at home as a nomad, and sometimes long for that freedom from responsibility. People will say “home is where your family ( or ❤️) is” but I agree that a tangible piece of earth where you can grow roots is a big relief, especially when you have a family.