Finding My Way Home
Discovering a place of safety after childhood trauma
If you are asked to describe what home means to you, how do you answer?
Is it the house where you live with your loved ones? Perhaps the childhood home you remember in rose-tinted hues? Or is it wherever you lay your hat?
Regardless of the soulful beauty of Marvin Gaye’s lyrics, I don’t believe that last one can ever truly portray the concept of home, and the feelings it engenders.
I’ve asked this question to many people over the years, and each time when I’ve got past the initial answer to the feelings beneath, some common themes appear.
Home is safety, warmth, comfort, family, love.
Robert Frost described home as;
“the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”.
Unfortunately this is not the experience for all of us, and it certainly wasn’t for me. Once I had truly grasped that I had never had a home in the way others experienced, as a feeling they carry with them throughout their lives, it led me on a journey to find my home.
My first home was a place of fear
The first house I knew, where I lived until age 13, was a place of noise, torment, and fear. The threat of violence was ever-present, and it was here I learnt my early lessons that I was a cursed member of a cursed family, and whatever happened to me, was because I deserved it.
During therapy, as an adult, I began to experience a severe flashback of events I could not place. There was no context, no sense of a timeline; it emerged quite literally out of the blackness.
The first time this flashback appeared, I was walking back to the apartment I was living in at the time, when suddenly I was engulfed in an inexplicable darkness. A face emerged from the blackness, the terrifying visage twisted in rage, eyes wild, lunging at me out of the night, even as I still knew I was standing on the street in broad daylight, paralysed with fear. My arms shot up instinctively to protect my head as fists rained down on me, pummelling my face and body as I felt the urge to curl up in a ball. Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone, leaving me bathed in sweat, heart pounding so hard my chest could barely contain it.
I almost ran to my apartment, so I could scribble down everything I could remember in the notebook I kept for recording experiences and thoughts I wanted to take into my next therapy session. I could still feel the soft, warm pyjamas on my skin, the harsh weave of the carpet on my left cheek, the hard, cold wall against my back. The angry face was either my mother’s or that of my eldest sister, but I couldn’t be sure which. With no further detail and no one to ask, I can never be sure exactly what was happening during this flashback, or when it happened. After much work, the best guess from my therapist was that this experience was “pre-language”. That phrase haunted my sleep for weeks afterwards.
Could it be true? Could my mother or my eldest sister have attacked me in the middle of the night, when I was too young to even have the language to understand what was happening? I later spoke to my best friend, who has known me since I was 13, and is the only person who has met my mother who I could trust to ask about this.
“Can you picture my mother comforting a crying child in the middle of the night?”, I asked. He looked extremely uncomfortable at the unexpected question.
“No”, was his answer, and I’d known it before I ever asked the question.
Just as my house was no home, my mother didn’t fit any criteria you would associate with being maternal. There was never any love, affection, or even a physical interaction with my mother that wouldn’t make me flinch defensively in expectation of a blow. If it is the people around you that make a home, then it is not so surprising that a household in which my mother once kicked me down the stairs without warning or provocation, is not one I’d ever associated with safety, or love.
Along with processing my flashbacks during my therapy, I also had to tackle the question of why my mother would tell me terrible tales from her own life. For as far back as I can remember, I would wake in the middle of the night to a voice in the dark, and my mother’s silhouette next to my bed, and she would be talking. For reasons I don’t think anyone will ever understand, she had selected me as her confessor, and I would be forced, throughout my childhood, to hear her own stories of psychological and physical abuse, violence, rape and loss.
This house may have been called our home, but it was exactly not that, by any of the definitions above.
You can’t build a home on rotten foundations
When my brother was 15, and I was 12, he had been sent away to an institution for disturbed children. The story my mother always told was that she had threatened to douse the car in petrol, lock her son and herself in the car and set it on fire. She even told the social worker she had canisters of petrol in the car ready to carry out this threat if they didn’t take him away, there and then. It is true that my brother was violent, a thief and seemed to cause trouble at every opportunity, with apparently no fear of any consequence, but considering the house he grew up in, are you surprised?
He died in that institution, shortly after being taken away.
After my brother’s death we moved house, and the nature of home changed with it. Now I was alone. My mother’s sanity had been shattered by the death of her son; my sisters were gone, as one moved out and the other was abandoned in a respite centre. Now it was deathly quiet, and a place of grief and emptiness.
When I finally escaped to University I felt freedom for the first time in my life, but while I was no longer in the hellscape-house of my childhood, the place I lived in, where I ate, studied and hung out with friends, never felt like home.
Fast-forward a few years, and I was married, with a young daughter. She was my world from the moment I first laid eyes on her, and so naturally I tried to build a home for my little family. However, I understand now that you can’t just conjure up that feeling of home, when you’ve never experienced it yourself. You can’t establish a feeling of stability when the foundations of your life and your identity are rotten to the core.
Soon enough, it all came tumbling down in the most destructive way possible. I won’t go into detail about what happened, just to say that it was the type of breakup that we all fear the most. At the end of it, I was alone again, and I didn’t get to see my daughter for 13 years.
In the years following my first divorce I drifted. Once again, the building I kept my stuff in, and where I lay my head to sleep, meant absolutely nothing to me. In fact, to own stuff, and feel any attachment to a place, was uncomfortable, even distasteful. The second divorce followed the first with a depressing inevitability, that I could only recognise years later when I’d finally started to face my demons.
Once I had faced those demons, and got to the end of my therapy, I knew I was still missing something, but just didn’t know exactly what it was, or how to get it. I spoke to friends, and my daughter, about this thing they called home. Was it ever going to be possible for me to have that as well?
The desire for a home was still there
I realised I wanted a home for myself. My place. My safe space. My sanctuary. The place I want to go, when I want to get away from everything else. Somewhere I can close my door, and be myself without mask or artifice.
I flirted briefly with trying to make an apartment homely, during one Christmas I shared with my daughter. It was lovely to see her smile, as she really is a home-body, but if I’m honest, the process made my skin crawl and I couldn’t wait to move on once again. The very idea of being weighed down by possessions, tying me to one location, so I couldn’t just pack a bag and go at a moment’s notice, made me feel twitchy. I tried to fully embrace the nomadic side of my character, living out of two bags and a guitar case, dreaming up plans to travel the world forever, but still I was missing something.
Then my oldest desire, that of sailing the seas on my own boat, combined with this strange new urge to feel at home. I bought Maid of Wyven, a traditionally rigged wooden sailing yacht, built in 1950, and carefully restored her during a year-long project at the historic Underfall Yard in my home town of Bristol. Not only was this a sturdy sailing-vessel that had already crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and cruised the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, but she was also a comfortable home on the water.
Here was where my nomadic soul, always “tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote”, as Herman Melville put it so beautifully, could “sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts”. But also, as I got used to the liveaboard life, here was a home for the first time.
When I sat in the cockpit with a glass of whiskey, the calm and quiet night sky freckled with stars, my shoulders would unknot, my ever-present frown would relax and my mind would match the sky. Calm and quiet. If I was away from Maid too long, I would yearn to be back. When I was working in London, and inevitably staying in rented apartments or hotels, my daughter would look me in the eye with a concerned and thoughtful frown and tell me, “time to go spend some time on Maid”, and she would be right.
But why does Maid feel like home, when all previous attempts had made me so uneasy?
Like the generations of nomadic communities before me, when I feel the desire to move on, I can take this home with me. On a boat, there is none of that clutter I associate with a house, rather a simplicity crafted by purpose, which I find comforting rather than spartan. Everything has its place, everything its reason, nothing is wasted.
However, it’s not just Maid but also the surroundings. My first clear memory is being on the water, with the grandfather I lost at an early age, and that connection is something primal. The sea, even when a storm is blowing, is a place of peace for me, with the wind, waves and rocking motion as relaxing as a meditation. In the end, I can try to wrap words around it, but ask yourself why it is that you feel at home, wherever that may be for you. It’s a feeling, and that’s enough for me.
As the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone was struggling with the concept of lockdown. For me, I had already been anchored in the middle of nowhere for a while. I would joke that I was engaged in extreme social distancing. They had said 2 metres, I thought they meant 2 miles.
As the lockdown began to stretch on, my friends had been regularly messaging, “Are you doing OK Paul?”. They were concerned for my mental health, and they had good reason. I initially had my own concerns about how I was going to handle being in such isolation for so long. But, as it turned out, I need not have worried. As things went on, I felt more and more comfortable. Surrounded, as we all are with the ever-present threat of Coronavirus, I was in my safe place.
Finally, I was home.
