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 with some commentary about what you discovered.
For this week’s blog assignment, I read lots of my fellow students’ blogs on their ideas of what home meant to them. Although I originally expected many blogs to be similar and repetitive, I was actually pleasantly surprised by how unique they all were. It was eye opening to see how many different representations home can take on, and all the different paths each of us have taken that have brought us to where we are today. Despite the differences, all the blogs I read moved me with their honesty, emotion, and candidness as people opened up about their childhoods and families. However, 3 blogs in particular really stuck out to me because of the similarities I found in them in regards to my own blog on home. For my blog this week, I decided to focus on the blogs Where We Grow by Melissa Kuipers, Let Me Come Home by Whitney Millar, and The Ambiguity of “Home” by Hailey Froehler.
These 3 blogs left the biggest impression on me as I was reading them because they shared my own values and assumptions towards what a home is. Here are some of the common themes and similarities I found:
Family
Quote: “The places I feel at home are…the people I’ve grown with” – Where We Grow, Melissa Kuipers
Quote: “I still feel like eating Pancit and Ginataang Bilo-Bilo with my Nanay has always been home to me” – Where We Grow, Melissa Kuipers
It seems like for many of us, family plays a huge role in the definition of what “home” is. In all of our blogs, there was a common thread where we placed family and loved ones as unnegotiable aspects of what a home is, even when that home was not one particular house or apartment but a constantly changing environment for those that moved around a lot. In my own blog, I mentioned that the memories I shared with my mom, dad, and brother are the ones that pop up when I reminisce on what home means to me. Even if these memories were technically spent on the road, away from our home in Calgary where I was born, the bond and love I felt gave me the truest sense of home. No matter how different all of our concepts of home are, the idea of family seems to hold a significant role in all of them.
Comfort
Quote: “It’s a comfortable environment full of loved ones that bursts with memories. Those are the three basic ingredients to a home for me.” – Let Me Come Home, Whitney Millar
Quote: “The home that provided me with all of my familiar comfort when I returned from university was no longer ours. Despite the fact that we were moving for good reasons, I couldn’t help but feel like I was losing the only constant space that I defined as home.” – The Ambiguity of “Home”, Hailey Froehler
Comfort is a theme that I stressed particularly in my own blog as the number one thing I feel home represents. Its a sense of familiarity, safety, and belonging that only comes with being at home. Reading Whitney Millar and Hailey Froehler’s blogs, this idea of comfort and familiarity seemed to be something we all mentioned and associated with our own separate ideas of home. For Hailey, her loss of comfort when she moved was emotional for her and she mourned it as a loss of her own idea of home. In my own blog, it was the sense of comfort I felt, surrounded by my loved ones, even in stressful, scary situations, that provided me a sense of what I see as home. Comfort seems to stay especially so close to each of our definitions of home because it tells us that we belong.
Home as not necessarily always a PHYSICAL concept
Quote: “After that, home was constantly changing for me: a dorm room, a suite with roommates, a subleased studio apartment.” – Where We Grow, Melissa Kuipers
Quote: “However, I feel like the concept of “home” is so ambiguous. Growing up I lived in two different homes.” – The Ambiguity of “Home”, Hailey Froehler
Quote: “I know that “home” doesn’t necessarily mean a physical space…” – Let Me Come Home, Whitney Millar
Last but not least, there was a constant mention of the idea of home as an idea, an emotion, a set of values, rather than just a physical place. In my own blog, I mentioned the struggle with feeling like I had missed out on the generic idea of “home” in my own life because I didn’t have the stereotypical grand house that I spent all my childhood making memories in. Rather, I moved around a lot and have jumbled up flashbacks in condos, apartments where I spent a few years here and there. Reading my fellow students’ blogs, I was comforted by this shared value that home isn’t always necessarily just a physical environment. Like Hailey Froehler stated so beautifully, the concept of home is truly “ambiguous”. I think this opens up the door for home to represent so much more and so many different things for each and every one of us. After all, it only makes sense that there is no one such thing called home. We’ve all come from such different walks of life, different families, cultures, and lifestyles, there is no way one stagnant concept of what a home is can hold true for all of us. It is through acknowledging this that I feel like we truly have the freedom in celebrating each of our own unique concepts of home.
Works Cited
Froehler, Hailey. “The Ambiguity of “Home”” ENGL 470A. The University of British Columbia Student Blogs, n.d. Web. 06 June 2015.
Kuipers, Melissa. “Where We Grow”. True North. The University of British Columbia Student Blogs, n.d. Web. 06 June 2015.
Millar, Whitney. “Let Me Come Home” ENGL 470A Experience. The University of British Columbia Student Blogs, n.d. Web. 05 June 2015.