Home

I was having dinner with a couple of my girl friends last night and mentioned that I get annoyed when people, including my husband, call my in-laws’ or my mom’s house “home” for us. My brother-in-law had texted Brad and asked him to “call home” when he has a chance; my husband relayed the message to me by saying, “I need to call home real quick.”

It bugs me because in my mind “home” is the place that Brad and I searched for together, filled together with “our things” and work in order to have. Home is the place where my husband and I have centered our lives and since we are  independent of our parents for the things we need, it’s weird to me to call either set of parents’ places “home.”

My friends understood what I was saying, but didn’t exactly agree with me. Although they both have their own apartments here, they told me that they still call “home” the place where they grew up. To them, mom and dad’s house is home.

It started to make a little more sense to me where the phrasing was coming from with my husband and in-laws. Brad grew up in that house and has many memories there. By the time Brad turned 18, he had only lived in two houses. By the time I turned 18, I had lived in 12.

We have a vast difference in perspective.

I used to joke that I had a nomadic upbringing because we moved so often. For me, it’s easy to stop calling a place home because I’m used to the location of home changing. Many people who had less of a geographically-varied childhood don’t have that skill as well developed.

Because of my preferences though, things are changing slowly. We never said I was heading home when I’d visit my parents in Pennsylvania, because I never lived there. We were going to see my parents, not their house. So it’s an easy adjustment to say that we’re going to see Brad’s family because after all, we’re visiting the family and not the house.

Where do you call “home”?

 

2 thoughts on “Home

  1. Aaah, I can see where you would have more connection to the home of you and Brad vs. any other place. That makes sense to me, with you all having moved around so much. My family has never moved (and I mean *never* — my parents still live in the house my great grandparents built) but even so I’m willing to call almost anything “home.” “Home” is very often wherever I’m going: I “go home” to my parent’s house and I “come home” to our house here in OH. If I’m staying with my sister and we’re out for some reason, I talk about taking something “back home”, by which I mean her place. It’s necessitated a lot of qualifying when talking to Lucas: “our home” or “home home” vs. “my home” and “your home.”

Leave a Reply to lifeloveandwords Cancel reply