Home Essay (for Queer Magic Podcast)
I haven’t been to my house in a whole month; I haven’t been home even longer.
They should be the same thing - every day, I wish they were. I'm an alchemist that's been searching for the formula that magically transforms four walls and a roof into a place I belong my whole life.
I've come close a few times - Ones That Got Away. The bedroom with a cave-like walk-in closet where I hosted sleepovers. The yard with a playhouse by a creek. The giant rock where Mr. Tumnus invited me to join him for tea in Narnia every afternoon.
What I didn't realize at the time was that my mother did this on purpose. Not only was buying-fixing-flipping the houses we lived in her livelihood - it was her salvation. Her family was dead, her only love had chosen someone else - and I, the long-desired daughter, had the unearned nerve to grace this earth looking exactly like him. Her lonely, nomadic spirit needed the affirmation of turning a structure abandoned into a refuge - in this way, she was an alchemist too. For everyone but me.
It took us awhile to acknowledge that I was not going to be a product of her environment, even though hers was the only exposure I'd had. Not only had I been born with my father's face, but his Indigenous blood and its longing for the homeland was flowing strong through my veins.
But I had also been cursed with everlasting patience. No matter how much I hated living with a go-bag under my bed just in case, I only truly rebelled one time, when I was 16. I threatened to get on a bus by myself and go back to the last town we lived in. I would sleep on my friend's couch, I didn't care. I almost wished she wouldn't bow to my ultimatum, but she did. She couldn't threaten me with a spank and a lost privilege, not anymore.
Sometimes I wonder if I'd be able to latch onto a home here a little easier if I hadn't been indoctrinated to view Heaven as my only home, the church the only safe haven on the way there. Sunday mornings were a full service with song, offering, children's church, sermon. Sunday evenings were acoustic worship and prayer. Wednesday nights with more singing and praying, maybe focusing on missions. Thursday nights were Bible study, which was actually my favorite night of the week because I would come home from school, take a nap, go to our friends' house, eat dinner, and then all of us kids would go into another room, away from the studying adults, with a giant bowl of popcorn to watch Star Wars or Grease on laser disc. Yes, Grease.
Somewhere along the line, our devotion changed from a typical 90s evangelical March For Jesus fervor to a practice a little more...fringe. Maybe it was the arrival of the Internet in our home, or current events playing out in the news; a fear had begun to seep into our hearts that we were not safe. Something was coming for us.
Would it be military takeover from another country? Stock market crash? Y2K? All of it, probably. Paranoia and conspiracy theory were basic language on our tongues; if a stranger in New Zealand posted on a Christian End Times forum a dream they had about a dark cloud with a Chinese flag on it rolling over the United States of America, we took it to heart. Would we kowtow to the principles of this earth and stay alive - or would we be Jesus Freaks and lose it all? The rubber had met the road, and that road took us to a remote cabin in the Canadian wilderness.
Just mom and me.
To be continued…