When We Return Home
Taking in the waves and watching his first California sunset.
Hudson is dipping his french fries into a lemon gatorade, and I’m not going to stop him. I have picked my final battle on this trip and french fries are a low bar at this point. We’re sitting in the atrium of Terminal A at John Wayne Airport at a horse-shoe bench and table. The rush has come to an end. I am finally able to sit back and take a bite of my In-N-Out cheeseburger. This is what dreams are made of. As if on cue, someone has sat down at the public piano a few yards away and has begun to play a slow sweet tune that takes seconds for me to recognize, it’s unmistakably “Moon River”. Another memory is gulped down and I look away from Hudson to abate the tears.
I knew coming to California with my son would be tough, beautiful, but tough. The whole place feels like a tender bruise that won’t quite heal right. Why is that? Well it’s the same reason I can’t give a straight answer when someone asks where I’m from. It feels like a complicated question that dances on the sensitive subject of home.
Naturally the next question is, “why is ‘home’ a sensitive subject?”. To most it’s a pretty simple definition: it’s a physical space, a house, an apartment, a grandparents property where everyone gathers for holidays, it’s a city or a town. For others it is far more transient, it is tied to the people that make a place home. I am among the latter. So when I am asked, “Where are you from?” what I hear is “Who are your people? Are they from here and where are they now? Where do you call home?”.
The best way to unload the question is one answer at a time.
Where are my people from? My mom’s side of the family originated from Denver, Colorado. My dad’s family was from the San Fernando Valley. My dad moved to Denver after college and met my mom. When I was five my family moved to Irvine, California. We don’t have an extended family, my parents are only children and their parents’ have passed. Colorado was a slice of home up until my Grandpa passed in 2017. Certain homes fade when people pass.
Where are they now? Gradually the family dispersed to upstate New York, Virginia, Texas, Washington and Oregon. No one lives in California anymore.
Where do I call home? This is where the answers get fuzzy.
I could say home is all over since that is where my family members are. A part of me does live with them and they with me so this is true. But when I close my eyes and think of home, my mind draws lines that turn into a birds-eye map of my childhood neighborhood. I remember when Irvine’s strawberry fields and orange groves sat plum across the wash from our cul-de-sac. I can transport from my home to our neighbors home, over the eucalyptus trees and play back the afternoons building forts in the wash. I remember when El Toro base sat nuzzled among fields of lettuce and groves of avocados with single lane roads running west to the ocean. This is the home of my childhood. A part of me still thinks I can hop on a plane and visit that Irvine but thirty years of development and accrued wealth have changed the landscape.
Newport Beach, CA
So if home isn’t a place from my past, is it the people?
Home is an odd blend of people existing in the same place at the same time and also people choosing to stay, choosing to be a part of that unit. It’s both chance and choice. Once my sisters moved out of state, home became transient. I know I’m not alone in feeling like home is something impermanent. The first time I read something close to this sentiment was senior year of high school. The book is called Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and is a haunting story of two sisters emergence from childhood into society as they recover from their mothers suicide. The sisters’ responses to the trauma eventually oppose one another. One seeks comfort with their transient aunt and caretaker, the other seeks convention and formality, eventually living with a teacher from her school. The sisters’ chose different lives and thus gain different homes forever separating them from one another. As an 18 year old, I knew homes physically changed. But it was my first time accepting the ones we call home may not choose to call us home anymore.
I love my family but it is fair to say, we are no longer one anothers’ homes.
Heading to dinner at Ruby’s on Balboa Pier, with Buzz. Of course.
So where is home now?
All through my early years in Seattle I wrestled with the notion of home. God has slowly untangled the loss, abandonment, and fear that was tied around my experience of home. And slowly over the years, without my intentional effort God has built a home around me. He has matured and softened my heart through marriage, which has created a bedrock for a family. Lucas and I have saved, struggled and skimped to redeem the home we own. Even still, I longed to return to a physical place that once felt like home to share with my husband and sons. So when we got the tickets for Disneyland, I was excited to share my home with Hudson. Time has changed my California as much as it has grown me, and this trip I got to experience a new place for the first time with my son.
Which, as I sit back, was the entire point of this trip. What will become Hudson and Jack’s memories of home? That is the sacred and honored work I have been given charge of. The moments do not need to all be magical. But I pray they know home is secure, it is stable, it is steadfastness and not because of my strength or Lucas’. I pray they know how wholly reliant our home is on Christ despite the changes that will arise.
As we wait for our flight to begin boarding it is fitting to have “Moon River” playing. There are the lyrics,
“Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker, Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way. Two drifters, off to see the world, There's such a lot of world to see. We're after the same rainbow's end”.
I will always be able to visit this childhood home in my memories but at present, it no longer exists. Instead home can be transient, it can change and shouldn’t be feared because of what my home truly rests on. And how exciting to know there is a whole world to experience and gain, and it too seeks home.
For now I pack up our bags and get Hudson settled back into his stroller. A new piano man is playing Phantom of the Opera and our plane will start boarding soon. I’m excited to get on the plane. I’m ready to see my husband and kiss Jack. I’m ready to return home.
The one picture I got him to smile with me, I call it a win.