Home

A theme that runs through a lot of the fiction I write is finding home in another person. Some will definitely argue that’s unhealthy, and I get that argument. If you make your home in another person, and you lose that person, now you’re metaphorically homeless. But ‘home’ to me has always been a feeling I’ve gotten from important people in my life, and never a place. The word home implies a sense of belonging and comfort and I suppose I’m at home in and with myself NOW (mostly), at 40, but boy, it took me a long time to get here to this mindset. And I still have to work on it sometimes. And there are a handful of…yes…other people…who helped me get here. I know without a doubt I wouldn’t be here, at home in and with myself, without the love and support and acceptance of those people.

The first people to give me that feeling of ‘home’ were my paternal grandparents. I was at home with myself as a little girl, but mostly only when I was with them. I felt more at home at their house than I did in the house I technically lived in, but it wasn’t because they lived in a safer or ‘nicer’ neighborhood. They lived in a little urban rowhouse with no off street parking where you could stand on your front stoop and shake your neighbor’s hand without them leaving their own front stoop. Close quarters and crowded. And where I technically lived was a more spacious, ‘newer’ suburb. And I like space. But it still felt more like home at Gramma and Grampa’s. It was the feeling of safety and acceptance and love I received in that house that made it feel like home. It was my grandparents, not their house.

Throughout my preteen, teen, and young adult years, after my grandparents passed away, I spent a lot of time grasping for little pieces of that ‘home’ feeling with other people, mostly friends and a couple of dates, because I decidedly didn’t have it at ‘home.’ But the feeling was always incomplete and fleeting, and I started to think ‘home’ was maybe a juvenile, naive, childish feeling that you could never really get back when you were better informed and more experienced. Maybe ‘home’ was just constructed delusion, like believing in the Tooth Fairy. And I bought into ‘home can’t be another person’ for sure during those years. So when I entered adulthood, I tried achievement and accumulation to find that ‘home’ feeling in and with myself. I moved out on my own. I bought the appropriate ‘stuff’ to prove maturity and independence and success. I bought my own house. And I felt like ‘home’ for *maybe* a week. I had a place…a NICE place. A nicer one than any other place I’d ever lived or felt at home before and it was ALL MINE. I was supposed to be DONE. I was supposed to feel supremely accomplished and whole and proud of myself, achieving the American Dream at a young age on my own and everything. I should have been totally at home in and with myself then. But I still didn’t really feel like home. I didn’t feel settled or ‘right.’ Not until I met J. When J moved in with me, the house I bought felt like home. And then we got married and on our first anniversary, we left that house…the one I’d worked so hard to buy on my own…and moved. A lot of people in my life (maybe even including myself, at least a little) expected me to feel this sense of nostalgic loss and maybe even resentment toward J upon abandoning something that was mine for something that was ours. For packing up ‘mine’ and dumping it all into ‘ours.’ That’s what I did. J didn’t have a house to sell and put the profits onto our new home together (he obviously contributed, but I guess people felt like my contribution was more symbolically sacrificial or something). But I never felt sad about leaving my first house. Because home is where J is. J is where I feel safe and accepted and loved.

I’ve written this feeling of home into practically every one of my books. It’s obviously a big deal to me since it’s a theme I keep on hitting, whether I begin the story intending to or not. One of the stories this theme is most pronounced in is Storm Chasing. Today’s love song I think goes with that story. It’s Don Henley’s Taking You Home. (I know. It was hard to find a YouTube of this song, so you get an old Letterman live performance. Strange.) Here are the lyrics…