You Can’t Go Home Again, Because It’s No Longer There

Every summer growing up, my sister and I would get on an airplane and fly across the country to California to visit my mother. It was part of the custody agreement, I was told. It made more sense for us to go see her, instead of her leaving her house and her other family to come see us. Divorce is difficult; it is rancorous and petty. It makes adults act like children, leaving the actual children to stand in as mini-adults, mediating arguments and muddling through. I wasn’t part of this decsion because I was 5 when the courts decided to give my father full custody, so getting on a plane to the Bay Area was what we did. Nothing about this seemed odd. It was just how my life was.

The first home I remember was Spanish style and stucco, on a good block in Richmond. We had a big yard and a basement apartment that we rented out to a rotating cast of tenants. The bathroom was the best part: huge with a jacuzzi tub and a big window with a sill that housed cacti in terracotta pots. I used to sit on the closed toilet and keep my little sisters company while they took baths.

When I moved to California in high school, making the decision to trade one home for another, there was no room for me. I slept in the playroom for six months, on a creaky futon, while my clothes shared space with my sisters’ in the walk-in closet upstairs. We moved farther out, to a house with room for all of us, in a town 20 minutes away. This home — a red and green ranch house somewhere very, very suburban — has been my California home ever since.

A few months ago, my mom told me that she and my stepfather were moving to Oregon. They were slowly selling their things, making important calls to brokers, and emptying the house of the detritus of our childhood. My sisters received boxes of papers, yearbooks, journals and countless photos—things that had been gathering dust in a storage unit and in the garage. They moved in the middle of December, and my mom texted us a picture of the townhouse they bought, a bland and boring skinny thing perched across the street from the train tracks that lead to Portland. They live in Hillsborough now, a town that looks … fine.

“There’s a big Asian grocery store near, but it looks pretty white,” my mom told me on the phone. She seemed happy enough. Is it a strange midlife crisis that strikes empty nesters once they realized that the house that they’re puttering around in is just too much space? We haven’t been able to figure out why it is they left, and the answers they’ve given us have been vague at best.

The concept of home for me is fluid. I’m in the habit of saying “back home” when I’m here, in New York, and meaning either my California home or my father’s house upstate. I’ve spent many years in both, imprinting on these spaces by fighting with my parents, screaming at my sisters, and sinking further into the couch while ignoring repeated requests to get up and set the table. Home is just a concept; it’s where you lay your hat. It’s where the heart is. And, for adults who’ve grown up and moved away from home, it’s an immovable monolith, something that exists so solidly in your memory as immutable that when that order is disrupted, you’re heartbroken.

As an adult, living in my own home, with my own routine and my own life, I understand that I have very little say in the decisions that my parents make. I don’t have the pressure of a mortgage, nor do I have an empty four-bedroom house in El Sobrante to ramble around. I have visions of my mother vacuuming in the middle of the hallway, pushing the Dyson past the open doors of our childhood bedrooms, the walls covered with faded magazine cutouts. It’s inherently selfish to think that once you’ve grown up and left your home for good, your parents moon around the spaces you used to inhabit, missing the sound of slamming doors and bickering. I know my mother and this is not how she operates. Maybe they were just tired of living in so much space. Maybe they wanted a change of pace, now that the children they’ve raised are relatively self-sufficient, adept at taking care of each other and themselves.

I’m not terribly attached to the house itself. The ritual of going home is much more important. We go to the Cheeseboard in Berkeley when I’m home and eat pizza. We eat Taiwanese food at the Asian mall. My mother and I fight briefly, half-heartedly, over whether or not I’m a good daughter or for wanting to stay overnight in San Francisco with friends instead of waiting at the El Cerrito Del Norte BART station until she picks me up, in sweatpants and wearing her glasses, half asleep. The house isn’t the issue; it’s this nebulous, comfortable concept of home that I already miss.

Megan Reynolds is an associate editor at The Frisky. She lives in New York.

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