Assignment 2:2 – Home is Where the Heart Is

Write a short story (600 – 1000 words max) that describes your sense of home and the valuesand stories that you use to connect yourself to your home and respond to all comments on your blog.

When I was a kid, my family shared our house with another family. They lived on the top floor, and we had the bottom. The little girl who lived upstairs was the same age as me, and we played together all the time. We used to sneak into our neighbours garden through his hedges because we thought it was a fairyland. I can’t remember whether we really believed it at the time, but I do remember it looking magical.

One morning, Gabrielle and I had a conversation about the house.

She said, “I never want to live anywhere else. We’re going to own this house forever.”

I was just as attached as she was to the place, so this made me inherently sad because I knew our families had already started to not get along. A few years later, my parents bought out her parents, and the house was all mine. I never talked to her about it, but I felt guilty knowing how much she loved the place.

When I was 16, and my parents separated, my mom bought a condo a few minutes away from the house. They bought it before they told my brother and I they were separating. My dad said he had the option of either keeping the house or buying a condo as well with bedrooms for my brother and I. He wanted our opinions, and I was adamant that we keep the house. I couldn’t imagine losing my home when there were already so many emotions to work through about my parents’ separation.

The funny thing was that as soon as I moved into the condo with my mom, it started to feel like home and the house I grew up in no longer did. I realized that my mom was the person who made home feel like home for me. It was the knick-knacks that brought back memories, the routines we had to make sure chores got done, the nights spent watching TV together on the couch, and the way we took care of each other. That was home for me. That was where I felt comfortable.

When I visited my dad on the weekends, I always felt slightly uncomfortable. This made me feel guilty because of course I loved my dad as much as I loved my mom. He was intelligent and interesting and we could talk for hours. But I’d constantly come home to dishes I needed to clean up, and an almost empty fridge. We didn’t have routines and it left me feeling like a visitor in my own house. My dad had the best intentions, but he didn’t know my habits the way my mom did. I never imagined he might surprise me with my favourite ice cream flavour the way my mom did from time to time. My dad liked to take me out for dinner or breakfast so we could have bonding time, but that always came with a sense of guilt that we were overspending on food consumption. I think the best way to describe our relationship at that time is awkward. I was a teenage girl, and naturally there were personal things in my life that I felt I couldn’t share with him.

Last summer, my dad sold my childhood home, and he moved into my mom’s condo after she moved to Sechelt. It’s still a funny feeling to drive by that house, and simultaneously feel so connected and disconnected to it. It’s weird to imagine other people living there and calling it home. But I wasn’t all that sad when I handed my key to the realtor. It was just a place, really. Home is where the people I love are. I still feel like I have two homes. My relationship with my dad has grown a lot since I was a teenage. We decorated the condo together when he moved in, and it feels like our place. And my mom’s place in Sechelt feels like home too. She has a guest bedroom, but she always refers to it as my bedroom.

For me, home is where I feel comfortable and loved.

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Works Cited

Looi, Claudia. “Top 10 Must-Do Things To Do on the Sunshine Coast, British Columbia.” Travel Writing Pro. Travel Writing Pro, 8 Sep. 2011. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.

SBG – Crewstock. “Land of Faerie.” Digital Art. Deviant Art. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.