I read through all of your home posts. I meant to only read 6, but I became very interested in tracking our similarities and differences, so I read them all. 

Here are some shared assumptions, values and stories. These are not necessarily shared across all blogs, but common threads I found among your posts:

Home is roots. Many of your stories focused around the place you were born and how this creates identity.  A number of stories focused on family roots and ancestral history in a specific place. Leo’s post put this idea into question, exploring the complexities of origin and ethnicity and cultural belonging. 

Home is where you grew. So many stories featured language of change, transformation and growth. This idea of home seemed very connected to our experiences of learning and becoming independent. I wonder if this would be different if our age average was older than I assume it is. 

Home is family.  A common thread among our posts is how family creates home. Beyond simply parents and siblings, a number of people expressed home as a community of people who make them feel loved. 

Home is joy and love and relaxation and being yourself. I was honestly surprised by the mostly very positive depictions of home that I read on your blogs. Most blogs connected their idea of home to experiences of love and happiness and calm. I know this is not the case for everyone and that home can be quite a challenging idea for many. I completely understand that this public blog site might not feel like a space to delve into your complex or painful experiences with the concept of home. Despite this understanding, I was surprised by the amount of positivity I read in your posts. 

Home is nostalgic.  Many people, myself included, seem to have reached into their past to come up with an answer for this blog post. Many posts discussed this feeling of longing for your childhood home, and how much our sense of home is related to memories.  A few posts focused on people’s current homes, but most seemed to be filled with remembering.

Home is land, ocean, mountains, seasons. There was some talk about the natural landscape of our home places. The ocean was mentioned many times. 

Home changes. This was a big one. Lots of people expressed that home was an ever-changing idea, as opposed to a fixed-address. Holly mentioned her parent’s divorce as a major shift in the idea of home. Lenaya said home was “more feeling than physical place.” Zac discussed his family home and his adult home and the push and pull of those two forces. Aidan described their sense of home as “ambidextrous,” saying that the West Coast was their home when thinking of land, and Toronto was their home when thinking of people. Mia wrote “ My mind became my home, a place I could escape to, that held all of the most precious moments and people I cared for.” Victoria described moving into her first home away from family. Leo summed their post up with this beautiful phrase: “Home is contradictory; it is elusive and unstable.”

 

My reflections…
I found it interesting, but I was not surprised,  that many of us wrote about our childhood homes. An assumption I have made is that our class is mostly under the age of 30 and mostly do not have children. I am sure this is not true for everyone! For example, I am not under 30. When reading your blogs I kept wondering at what point you feel like your home is the place you live, and not the place you grew up. I’m sure if asked to describe her home, my mother would describe her current home, not her childhood home in Ireland. But then again, she has raised 3 children in that home and been divorced and remarried and built a garden and renovated the garage and had more birthday parties and family gatherings than could be counted. So no wonder, I guess. 

There were many values that seemed shared across our blogs – family, comfort, safety, the nostalgia of childhood, connection to land, ease – but the sense of belonging stood out to me. So many blogs spoke about feeling surrounded by love and feeling able to be one’s true self. I think this is belonging. And I considered, through writing my own post and reading all of yours, the difference between feeling like you belong and feeling like something belongs to you. I don’t feel like my home town belongs to me. I don’t even feel like my childhood home belongs to me. I don’t feel like my current apartment belongs to me. But I feel a sense of belonging in these spaces. 

Finally, I thought about privilege as I wrote and read. I think our posts about home indicate some privilege within our class. The joyful and seemingly peaceful reflections on the idea of home are a privilege, as are easeful family relationships. Having a safe childhood home to reflect back on is an indicator of privilege. You could say there is also privilege simply in feeling like you belong somewhere.

Thanks for sharing all your stories of home. I really enjoyed reading them and learning a little more about you all.