Read at least 3 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find. Post this list on your blog.

Reading through classmate’s blogs this week was an absolute pleasure. It was interesting to read through a few of the stories of my peers to see what their idea of home is, and why. Despite the idea of ‘home’ being a somewhat abstract one, the blogs that I arrived at shared several ideas.

• The idea that I found repeated most frequently, by myself as well, was that home is not a physical location, not really, it tends to be more tied to people and memories than any one location.
• Home is constantly changing and adapting as our lives do, it is not stagnant.
• When home does refer to a specific place it is one where we feel safe and accepted, surrounded by love.
• Home is wherever we want it to be, and can be multiple places at once.

After reading through the blogs one thought kept creeping into my mind, what would have happened if one of us had never felt this feeling of ‘home’, had never been in a situation where they had a real one? Would they have been able to complete the assignment?

If the majority of us have mentioned terms like ‘safety’, ‘belonging’, and ‘love’ in our posts about what home means to us, then what would home be to someone who had never been surrounded by those things? Following along with this line of thought, what would happen to someone who once had a home, but had it, and everything attached to it, be snatched away from them? If your physical home as well as your family were snatched away from you, would that knowledge of what a ‘home’ was to you remain, or can that too be taken away?

I can’t imagine this happening to me, I have no idea how I would deal with it, but I know it has happened to thousands of children in Canada’s past. I wonder if any study has been done on whether the destruction of a home, having that feeling of safety and belonging be stripped away, can permanently damage a person’s ability to construct a new one. I hope not, because the idea that someone could live unable to find a new home is incredibly frustrating and sad.