Coming Home
“Where Are You From?” and Other Impossible Questions
The question “Where are you from?” has been difficult for me for a long time. It’s a question so common in the Getting-To-Know-You process that it seems like it should have a simple answer, but my jaw clenches every time I hear it. The truth is that I don’t know the answer to this question.
There are replies I can give to swiftly sweep this question away from me without looking it in the eye:
“I grew up (mostly) in North Carolina.”
“I moved here a few years ago from Florida.”
There are replies I have given that are closer to a whole truth, although much more than anybody ever cares to know:
“I grew up mostly in North Carolina, but my parents are from Pittsburgh; I don’t want either place to claim me. I went to school in New Hampshire and spent not-quite-a-year in Florida before bopping up here.”
The Question emerges in my job interviews as well, because of course it does. Even though I have been living here in my chosen home for almost two years now, I still get nervous that potential employers will notice the number of states named on my resume and think me unstable.
When I first met my partner, he asked me where I was from, and I let myself give the fullest and most honest answer at the time. That answer warranted about thirty minutes of explanation and clarification of chronology, geography, and psychology.
I grew up the dependent of a United States Marine. My family’s military affiliation did not mean that we moved any and everywhere — really, we just bounced between western Pennsylvania and eastern North Carolina a few times. Most of the bouncing happened before I can remember; I was three when we moved into the house that I — mostly — grew up in. But when I was 10, my family moved from that house back to western Pennsylvania, and we spent roughly 3 years living only an hour’s drive away from our extended family.
In the months leading up to that move, I was excited. I wanted the adventure and possibility of a new place. My brain was deeply immersed in visions of youthful autonomy, spurred on by too many Baby-sitters Club books. I imagined that I would ride a bicycle down the sun-dappled streets of some new mystery hometown. I would run fast, wear comfortable but stylish outfits, write poetry under trees, and have friends. Maybe my new street would even have sidewalks so I didn’t have to dip my tennis shoes into fire ants like a surreal and nightmarish fondue fountain.
My years in PA — from age 11 to nearly 14 — were transformative for me. I did take up poetry, writing, and music with more verve than before, though eventually abandoned my more athletic inclinations. I did make friends, and wear comfortable but stylish outfits. (I still miss a pair of boots I wore in 7th grade — oh, if only the dog hadn’t found them quite so delicious.) Most importantly, in PA, I could walk. When I started Junior High, the Powers That Be decided I lived too close to get bussed, and I got to walk to and from school. I alone was in charge of leaving my house on time every morning and getting myself where I needed to be. There was a public park a few blocks from my house, and in the summer I’d go there sometimes four times a day, just to walk, to be alone with my music (Jewel and Tracy Chapman were my homegirls at the time), to get out of the house. I was still hugely dependent on my parents and especially my mother, but the ability to independently transport myself not only to and from my school but to a place of respite — that was autonomy. For the first time in my life, I felt happy, and for the first time in my life, I felt like a person.
At the time, I still felt strong ties and a vague sense of loyalty to our home in North Carolina. When people would ask, “Where are you from?” I would tell them, “North Carolina,” and it was simple.
We returned to our NC house a few weeks after the September 11th attacks. Coming into a community heavily influenced by military personnel shortly after September 11th was jarring enough, but moving back to North Carolina also triggered what I call My Little Shift.
I was excited to return to North Carolina. It was about a 12-hour drive between our old and new-but-older homes, and it was exciting in the last 15 minutes to see familiar streets outside my window. We pulled into our old-new driveway at our old-new house. It was about 8 in the morning and the sun was hiding behind the clouds. My mom left the driver’s seat and carried some snacks into our old-new house. I think my brother was actually asleep, because he doesn’t have my condition (Must Obsessively Monitor The Driver So Driver Doesn’t Fall Asleep or Hit a Deer and Kill Us All-itis). I was exhausted from staying up all night to watch my mother drive, so when I managed to peel myself out of the backseat and into the front yard, I just stood there for a moment.
And then everything dropped. In my heart, there was a Little Shift. I wasn’t happy to be back. It wasn’t even that I had built up high expectations for my previous home that reality didn’t meet — it was the realization that I was and had been wrong about the place I’d been calling “home” for the last three years. This wasn’t home anymore. I’d been home for three years without recognizing it as such. I realized that being three years older in North Carolina didn’t grant me any freedoms; I would still be stuck, as I had been during elementary school, relying on my mother to drive me around. Unable to decide on a whim where I wanted to go on the weekends, unless it happened to be to our mailbox across the road. And my new middle school and potential social life would be infected by students who remembered me as “the girl who didn’t talk” in elementary school, or “the girl who tried to awkwardly join in conversations after she did talk, and then we looked at her like she wasn’t human.”
When my dad arrived with the moving van and we unloaded our boxes, I built a cardboard tower in the corner of my new-old bedroom. In the center of the room, clothes and daily necessities were unpacked, my bed was set up, and I claimed the last tenant’s abandoned nightstand — a two-drawer deal with starting-to-chip white paint. But I never opened the boxes in the cardboard tower. I reasoned that I might as well not unpack them, because I would be moving again soon enough — for college. In 5 years.
This story could well be seen as the story of How Teresa Starting Researching Colleges in 8th Grade, but it’s also the first big, resolute decision I made in my life. And it’s the source of my emotional divorce from hometowns of chance. In My Little Shift, I no longer felt like that town in North Carolina was home. It became a way station. I felt very foolish for having believed in the idea of a singular, physical, geographic home; I knew even the city I’d forgotten to call home in Pennsylvania wasn’t going to be my home anymore. And now I’ve used the word “home” three times in one sentence. To the point of it all:
Location matters. Infrastructure matters. Love and friendship and personal growth matter. I felt — a bit late — that I had been “home” in PA because of who I’d been able to become while I lived there. I had access to some seemingly basic things that allowed me to live my life outside of my own head — sidewalks and public spaces within walking distance and opportunities at my school. Even the internet and cable television — we hadn’t had cable or a computer before the move to Pennsylvania.
At this point in my life, I have chosen and been chosen by my home-places. I chose Boston for the sheer amount of businesses, for the many universities and cultural communities and opportunities, for a liberal bent that forces me to wonder what’s compost and what’s trash but also lets many of my friends marry their chosen partners. Parts of Boston — Jamaica Plain and the center of town (Public Garden, Boston Common, Copley Square) — have chosen me. Certain roads, corners, gas stations feel like home just for being part of the background scenery to my and my partner’s relationship. If he’d happened to move to Cambridge instead of JP, I have no doubt I’d be sentimentalizing the crap out Central Square.
I’m firmly in love with Boston for the time being, but there’s always room for new home-places, and I don’t know how many I’ll get to have. New memories on new park benches, new familiar intersections and memorized grocery store layouts, new favorite cheeseburger places. I don’t want to tell you where I’m from. I just want you to know where I am.
