There’s only one place for me to start this series of newsletters, and that’s with thoughts about home.
Two nights ago, I had a dream in which my Dreamer said, “The great paradox of groups is that we crave belonging in them while contrarily craving to be seen and validated as individuals by the same group.” I attribute this quote to my Dreamer because I won’t be taking the time to look up who or what planted this idea in my subconscious. It simply rings as a collective truth we all hold somewhere within us.
Home is more than a physical location, it is a place of belonging. I’ve always had a physical location to live, I haven’t always felt I belonged. In a sense, I spent most of my childhood longing for a home. I longed to belong. And I longed to be seen and validated as an individual. Both of these experiences were elusive.
Mine were good-enough parents (a reference to the term good-enough mother coined by D. W. Winnicott). But truly seeing and validating a child’s essence and experience requires a certain level of presence and emotional regulation that many parents simply hadn’t cultivated. To be fair, our society doesn’t value emotional regulation. On the contrary, it often values and rewards emotional dysfunction and all the benign ways we defend ourselves from vulnerable feelings. Furthermore, my parents both came from dysfunctional homes.
My first home was in Paramaribo, Suriname. I haven’t returned to Suriname since I left. I don’t feel a connection to that location. After that, I have fond and few memories of living with my family in Beaufort, South Carolina. Then, my parents divorced when I was around 6 years old. Things soon got a bit rocky. For one, I became a latch-key kid. My mom married my stepdad, a Marine, when I was 10. We didn’t move a lot, but we moved enough that I spent grades 9-12 in three towns, at four different schools, and in four different homes. The final move came just before my senior year. I don’t feel a connection to the school from which I graduated even though I still have a couple of friends from that year. I’ve never attended a high school reunion. I don’t even have a place I consider my hometown. Sometimes, I say it is Beaufort, SC, and sometimes I just claim the state of North Carolina.
I remember telling myself, on days I felt out of place at school and home, that one day I’d have a home of my own and I’d be able to create the home I always wanted for my family.
Luckily, I married a great life partner. He was somewhat of a hippy when I met him. I was really surprised when he ended up joining the Air Force. Instead of settling down after our education moves, as I thought we would, we continued moving around for his career.
We are both children from divorced families and we both often felt out of place. We have always felt at home with one another, even when we didn’t have one, and even when we were living in different countries.
To make a long story short, and really, just to lay the groundwork for the significance of the word “home” I am going to fast forward a bit.
In the summer of 2018, I decided to quit my job and work for myself. That way I would have more flexibility and more time with my children. Then, my husband decided to leave the Air Force. We had hoped to stay in North Carolina. He looked for a job, but he didn’t have any luck. We opened up our search and he found a job in California.
We moved here in 2019 hoping to give our four children stability. I wanted my son entering high school to attend one school for all four years. We both wanted to stop working evenings and weekends so we could spend more time with them.
We took time and chose a job that offered the best opportunity to create a lifestyle that would allow us more time as a family. We also wanted the boys to be able to walk/ride their bikes to school so they could have a sense of independence. This was especially important to us after living in a rural neighborhood and having to drive them everywhere they wanted to go.
After selecting our current location, we moved across the country and into a small rental home. Weeks and then months went by without finding a house to purchase. We started to wonder if we had made a mistake. We especially thought we might have made a mistake when the anniversary of our move coincided with my husband’s return from a COID-19 deployment to New York City. It had become clear to me that it would probably be a year before I’d see any of my family again. We seriously considered moving back to North Carolina without any job prospects. We decided to give ourselves to the end of the month to find a home. If we didn’t find one, we’d move back and purchase a home to ride out the pandemic with some sort of semblance of stability.
Our realtor texted me within a week. I went to see the house right away, and, as the story goes, I knew it was the one. The house, like others, offered more than what we wanted, but it was the backyard that sealed the deal.
The scent of jasmine filled the air. There were roses, hydrangeas, lavender, and rosemary—all of my favorites. A corkscrew willow shaded a meditation space. Raised beds sat empty, asking me what I would plant for our table. The more we explored, the more we knew we were home.
Finally, the coincidences we wove into a “this-is-meant-to-be” story offered us a “happy ever after.”
Turns out, some of that unraveled pretty quickly.
It was a happy ending/beginning, but not for reasons one would think. Now I am questioning everything about such '“meant-to-be” stories. And I am ready to be done with such nonsense. I think.
Stories are powerful. As a mental health professional and play therapist, I work with stories all the time and have taught about the importance of healthy stories to our inner psyche and to society at large. Some of the unexpected gifts in our new home are the stories the garden tells. I have found many objects in the garden. Some were obvious and easily found, some held secrets to be discovered later, and some were complete surprises that I dug up from the ground or found behind bushes.
My garden is speaking. I am listening. In our conversation, I am making sense of my life during COVID-19. And I am holding and sometimes making sense of unraveled stories and meaning that once held me and propelled me forward.
In this newsletter, I will share the stories with you. We reside within the stories we tell. They are stories of belonging and not belonging, of validation, and of violation.
I’m sorting fact from fiction as I continue discovering items in the garden. And as I continue discovering truer aspects of myself and society at large … to which I do belong.
There’s a deeper question that is driving me, are these stories part of something greater? Are they part of something that is meant to be? Or are they stories we tell ourselves to give us courage where we lack faith—in others, in ourselves, or in a higher power?