Note: Today's blog post was actually first written in July, but I wasn't allowed to post it until earlier this month. Then I delayed posting it this month for one reason or another. In fact, I seriously rethought posting it at all. After much thought, I decided I needed to put it out there into the Blogophere. If this is a loose record of my life, then I need to stop censoring myself or caring about possible feedback. This is a certain way I was feeling back in July 2010 after some news was broken to me. By now I'm at a different place emotionally, but more on that later.
When does your childhood really end?
For some people it is over when they leave the nest, go to college, or get their own place. For others, it may end when they marry and become parents themselves.
For all that we become grownups, moving out, starting lives and/or families of our own, I believe that there’s still a part of you that hangs on to your childhood, maintaining a connection to the past beyond family relations – a link to a place, just as much as people. A place to go for comfort and security, a refuge to go in case of emergencies, where you go for the holidays -- that place called your childhood home.
But what happens when you can’t go “home” again? If one day, sometimes without warning, the bond has to be broken.
Your connection to the building you grew up in evolves, just like you. The color of the walls may change. The landscaping may change. Furniture and décor may be replaced or modernized. Remodeling may take place, but the essence -- the hominess is still there.
You may leave for college, and your childhood bedroom may be changed into a guest room or an office. However, you could still come home for vacations or holidays and have a place to stay. You may move to another apartment, and need to store your stuff in the family basement or garage. The neighborhood could change for good or bad, the town could seem more or less urbane/rural than you remembered, but you could still come “home” and feel a connection, in your familiar, safe haven.
Until…
Until it’s stripped of the essence of you and your family, boxes packed, painting neutralized, the rooms left bare, or worse, the house sold to another family. Then it’s not YOUR home any more. Doesn’t that mean that last link to your childhood is completely irrevocably broken?
It’s like losing an anchor. It leaves you adrift. Unmoored.
If “Home is where the heart is,” where is your heart when your anchor is uprooted?
What then?
2 comments:
I totally understand this. Even though my parents have changed the look of the house since I moved out, it's still the house I grew up in. I've told Doug I want to buy it when they decide to move because I can't imagine anyone else living there. I don't know how he managed it when his parents sold his childhood home.
This is one of my favorite posts that you've ever wrote. It is so real and exposed. I guess since my parents divorced when I was in my teens "home" was always where my mom was. Even when she moved out of our hometown to the "big city," I still called her new house "home." She even calls the extra bedroom "my room" and has decorated it in a very girlie style, which is something I never had in my childhood home. Your home can also be were you are - right now.
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