The ever-elusive home

Peacebang writes about the concept of "Home." The idea of Home has always been a complicated issue for me. My husband and I bought the house I grew up in, but it still doesn't completely feel like home. The Washington DC suburbs feel like home, but the house in general never has. We're working on it. I had for many years wanted a bedroom with deep blue walls and white trim, a white bed and white curtains. All we need now is the curtains.

I remember reading in the Anne of Green Gables series as a kid that a house needed a birth, a death and a marriage to really become a home. This house has had its marriage and honorary-sister-in-law-Tina is going to give it a baby pretty soon. Death has happened near this house, but not, thank goodness, to any human who has lived here since my family bought it a couple of decades ago.

The paralells between births, deaths and marriages making a house a home and those being the very things we announce in joys and concerns, are pleasing of course.

One of the weird aspects of growing up in a somewhat unhappy situation is that one really doesn't have any concept of what a happy family looks like and one makes assumptions that might not be correct. I saw the movie "StepMom" when I was in college and when Susan Sarandon and her daughter were running around the house lipsynching to MoTown and dancing, I whispered to my friend Chuck, "my family never did that sort of thing."

He whispered back "No families do that sort of thing except in the movies."

In retrospect, duh. But I wasn't totally clear on that at the time.

So anyway, it is indeed possible that my standards for "Home" are a bit too high.

In truth, I sleep best and the world feels most natural when I am with the people I care about. In that sense, home is wherever theCSO is.

(Which means right now, home is an anime convention in Baltimore.)

At the end of her post, PB asks: If the Earth was imperiled in some way that required immediate evacuation to another planet, would you get on the ship to go? Or would you choose to perish with the Earth?

As convinced as I am that I will never find a home that matched my idealistic vision of one, I would be the first one on that ship. Can't hurt to keep looking.

CC