Gary, businessman and father, sits at the head of the table and asks how everyone’s day went, meanwhile mother and housewife, Susan, cues her children to respond with a smug grin on her face. The daughter is typically either rebellious or preppy, and her sass is quickly shut down by a little brother’s excitement about soccer practice. This can be seen in a typical Hallmark or Disney Channel movie- cliché for some, reality for others, but sometimes, outside of the movies, the father is not a businessman. Instead, he is an aircraft mechanic, battling alcoholism and an addiction to nicotine. The mother is not always a housewife, nor is she always happy, sometimes she builds up walls where she wants them broken down, and doesn’t know how to give a love she never received. And sometimes the daughter is not preppy, or rude, but is a straight a middle school student, has a smile on her face, and struggles with suicidal thoughts while she battles depression. The second scenario was much like my family growing up.
As a twenty-year-old, I can say I have found a sense of belonging and a firm foundation within my faith, the love I’ve received, and within the love I’ve learned to give to others. However, as a ten-year-old, love was a foreign concept and God was a faraway constellation, billions of light years away, too far out of reach. Home was a place of sheltering for emotional abuse, and a showdown between a desire for perfection being met with disappointment. I craved to feel whole, I desired love, and I wanted to be a part of the perfect family. A family where it’s okay to run to mom when things aren’t okay. A family where dad is strong in his faith, and talks to his daughter about someday travelling the world. A home, where love is embedded in the walls, and where shouts are silenced with laughter. If my heart was a house, then that’s what would be found, but if my home is made of the people I grew with, then that is not what is found, because Gary and Susan are an archetype that not all families follow.
My mother’s words are part gunshot, part chamomile tea, and her clothes smell of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds. She is loving, and she is kind, but she is also chaotic and imperfect, as we all are. When I look into a mirror, I see the same tint of brown her eyes have, and I’ve yet to find one shade of pink that resembles the peony hue of her lips. When she gets mad, the expanse of her eyes grow wide, as if trying to show me the storm welling up inside of her. She throws around her words like bullets, and minutes later, comes to quietly ask if she can pick those bullets back up. Her blood type is B Plus, but her heart bleeds doubt, chaos, and compassion all at the same time.
Now my father- he is the love of Jesus embodied in the flesh of a healing alcoholic with a middle eastern temper. He is humble, and he is compassionate, but he is broken, and seeks to suppress his languor in all the wrong ways. He is willing to lay his life down for people who have treated him in the worst of ways, and his love for others is the same kind I see in myself. The day he leaves this earth will be the day when I am left with nothing else but a mirror to see my reflection in. Nevertheless, he is slowly learning that life is not found at the bottom of a beer bottle, but in the smile of his only daughter.
As to where in the ideal household, you could run to your parents for advice and counsel, many more were the times when my parents came to me. Many more were the times when I lifted their heads above toilets that smelled of Merlot and Captain Morgan. Many more were the times when they came to apologize to me for saying all the wrong words, and many more were the times when a ten-year old me could not run to her parents in times of trouble, because I was the only parental figure I could find. And that’s okay, because home will not always look like the family in “Leave it to Beaver”, nor should we ever feel ashamed to call home a place that is imperfect, and not like the ideal family. Sometimes home doesn’t have a Gary, or a Susan, and sometimes home is a place we choose to not remember, and for some, it is a soul-seeking refuge, and that is also more than okay. Home is often defined as the place where one lives. That means home is more than one place. One day, home is where you go to after school, where you eat, and where you sleep for a set number of years. The next day, home is thirty-one miles away, or three thousand miles away, and it is found within the eyes of someone you love, or within the one-hundred-ninety-foot square space that is your dorm bedroom. For now, my heart is a house, and that is the place I will choose to call home.
With this in mind, if I narrowed down my childhood home to one place, it would be composed of six different moves, four different realtors, and one city. Home was once a four-bedroom house with a fireplace, a yard, and half a mile of a forest I could run to at all times. After my parents separated for a while, and my mom was without a job, home was then a one-bedroom apartment where the stove sat three feet from the bed. Now, home is a two story house with both my parents back together, and everything you could need, but at the end of the day, home will never be the four walls that embody my family. Home is not composed of the paintings, china, and decorative napkins my mom has purchased through the years from a Better Homes catalog- home is the anxiety and pain she suppresses by buying all these things to somehow make her feel like her life is not falling apart on some days. Home is not the three different staircases you will find as you travel from the front door to my bedroom- instead it is the stumbling of my father up those stairs as he comes home late from drinking one too many beers, singing a Cat Stevens song, and smiling at me and my mother as if the weight on his shoulders is not too much to bear. Home is my bedroom, whose walls have been painted with midnight prayers to help me love my family as best as I can, and to understand that it is not my job to fix broken people, but to love them. And more than that, home is the place where the heaving in my dad’s laugh parallels mine, and where the talkative nature of my mother fills every room in the house.
When I go home to visit from college, my family and I sit and eat dinner together at the dinner table, more than we did than when I was growing up. There is something about distance that strengthens the foundations of a home more than ever before. The summer after my freshman year of college, I told my family all I had accomplished in my first year.
“Woo! She came out smart like me.” My dad tells my mom as she laughs.
“Uhm, no, I didn’t come out like either of you.” I tease back at my dad.
“Oh, man! Is that right? Well, that’s why I love you.” He tells me.
At the end of the day, home really is where the heart is. The architecture of my home is one-part imperfection, two parts joy and love, and as the days go by, I realize that home is within me. Home is the love we hone and carry inside, as we choose to love the imperfections we see in each and every person that we cross paths with. To love my mother, is to love a tree with branches that easily fall. To love my mother, is to love someone who is willing to help others, but not herself. My mother can either be a raging sea or a calming whisper, but she will always be the brown in my eyes. To love my father is to learn to love myself as I turn a blind eye to his imperfections. To love my father is to love the thunder in his voice, and to sing him a song with no voice. To love my family is to speak English when they’re speaking in tongues, and to accept that which cannot be changed, but in some sad, and lovely way, we need each other, and I too, am blood type B Plus, with a hint of compassion and chaos.
**Update: For purposes of honesty in the narrative and its content, as of September 2017, my dad is now clean from his drinking habit and has changed his lifestyle dramatically.