Homeless in my Hometown
And discovering what home really means.
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It’s almost the High Holidays, the holiest time in the Jewish calendar. There’s Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the new year and re-starting the reading of the Torah; ten days of repentance; and finally Yom Kippur, the day of fasting and seeking forgiveness from the year’s transgressions. This is the most important time of year for my father, despite the fact he isn’t generally religious. Growing up, he lived in a household with Kosher meat, going to synagogue almost every Saturday. The holidays were a major gathering time for all of the relatives, a time to remember the importance of family.
In mid-June, my father called and asked me of my holiday plans, and I was unsure of where I’d end up. He asked me if I would come home to Michigan. I said yes.
But it isn’t my home. Not anymore.
In the first twelve years of my life, my family moved six times in five different states. My father was in the hotel industry, and in that business if you want to move up you have to move out. We never spent more than three years in one place, sometimes staying as little as six months. Although for much of it, I was too young to be fully cognizant of the changes, the last few moves were painful. I said goodbye to my friends, my school, and the house we lived in, knowing we would likely not return. It never felt like there was true stability. Each time we became settled, everything was uprooted to a new town and a new life.
Our last major move was across the country from New Jersey to Michigan. Perhaps, I thought, this was going to be it. This was going to be where we would have our family and our home. Although the idea of a living so far from the coastline wasn’t appealing, I was ready to find my way in a new town with the potential to be a home forever.
This was not the case. The move to Michigan was the beginning of a deeply rooted unhappiness for all of us. My mother had grown up there and wished to return to her hometown in order to rebuild broken bonds with her family. Though the shrinking of distance eased some of the conflict, decades of unhappiness and arguments were not easily forgotten. My father had left the hotel industry after over fifteen years, and he struggled with the career switch to mortgage banking that allowed us to move in the first place. My father moved first and was put up to the task of finding a place to live. With its many structural flaws (real and otherwise fantasized by my mother), the house he chose became a constant source of tension, bubbling under the surface.
My parents separated in 2008, and my mother kept the house, while my father moved into a friend’s nephew’s spare bedroom. Everything we had was being broken apart, and life was full of added uncertainty. Where would we go? What would happen to myself and my brother? The following summer, she had a paranoid break and told me I was no longer welcome to live with her. She believed I was relaying secrets to my father in the height of their divorce proceedings.
I joined my father, sleeping on a couch in a stranger’s basement, only returning to my mother’s once to pack away most of my possessions before moving to college. In 2009, the house, which had been a curse on my family since moving to Michigan seven years prior, was foreclosed.
When I moved off to college, I had the chance to decorate my own space. I could try to make my bare bones dorm room into something more personal, warm and welcoming. I put posters above my desk and added my own pink cotton sheets and striped comforter. However, because I was sharing a space, I never really quite grasped how to make it feel like my own. I was just a temporary guest in a campus building.
My mother had a certain sense of style when it came to decorating the house. For the sitting room, she sewed custom pillow shams with curtains to match, each piece placed just so. My brother and I were relegated to a “living room” with computers and a couch that she didn’t fear would be destroyed. She painted the downstairs bathroom with a golden finish, matching the antique soap dispenser and towel rod. When she cleaned and put on a presentation for guests, our house could have appeared in a Home and Garden spread.
Always a crafty person, she went through various phases of artistry. While we lived in New Jersey she started a faux-finishing business and painted various facades in people’s homes. I sat in on “Take Your Daughter To Work Day” and watched her as she intricately painted marble-like veins on the living room walls. When we moved, she took to painting old furniture in the garage. We had various pieces throughout our own house that she couldn’t bear to part with: a dresser in the foyer with a faux marble top, a small bookcase in my room with zebra-striped sides, a tall standing jewelry cabinet refreshed with yellow paint.
By high school, the sitting room with fancy pillows remained almost entirely untouched. The entryway mirror lost its gleam from all of the dust that began to collect. She couldn’t get out of bed unless it was to have another drink.
Despite her attempts at artful decoration, my mother always hated the house. The kitchen was narrow and unable to suit her grandiose cooking needs. The basement was a small, concrete closet, home just to a furnace and minimal storage. On top of that, it was constantly flooding, no matter how many new sump pumps were put in, and so it could never be used to store anything of value. She never failed to mention her contempt for this to anyone who would listen. But even after all of that, when she sought the divorce, she clutched on to it for dear life just so my father couldn’t have it. She knew that keeping it was the only option. She couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.
By the time I graduated high school, my belongings and furniture resided in what used to be my room, but I had long since given up on making the house my home. Instead, the house brought painful memories and anger. My resentment of the move to Michigan festered, each injustice piled on top of the next. I felt abandoned, forced to figure out how to take care of myself and my brother while my mother drank her booze and later went to Alcoholic’s Anonymous meetings. What once was a strong, family unit had quickly dissolved into four bitter individuals. I dreamed of the day I would be able to leave for good, never looking back.
When the foreclosure finally happened, it was not a surprise. I felt a sense of relief, to know that the pain could perhaps be left behind. There was closure, ending the darkest chapters in my life thus far. The house on Parkland Drive would soon be no more.
Two months before the closing window, I came back to pack away what I didn’t already move out for college—childhood knick knacks, photo albums, and my substantial book and music collection—into large plastic bins. But I couldn’t pack away the memories, good or bad.
When I entered my old bedroom, I found all of my possessions on the floor. My mother had sold the furniture.
After the foreclosure, both my mother and father moved into two-bedroom apartments with the second bedroom reserved for my younger brother, who was still in high school. Of course it made sense that I didn’t need my own room. I’d only be back from college for small chunks of time, like holidays and weekends. I spent only one summer after college in my hometown, living out of suitcases and sleeping on my parents’ and friends’ couches.
Without a car of my own, I relied on sharing with my brother. While he was away at summer camp, a bag of clothing always remained in the car in case I needed to escape (from either parent). It wasn’t much, but enough for a couple of nights away at a friend’s house. I decided I would do anything in my power not to live like that again.
My father moved in with his fiancée in 2011, a woman he’d started dating seventeen months prior. My brother and I were given free range of her basement, which, while spacious, could never really be called our own. Sure, some of my plastic bins were there, pristinely labeled by their content, but it was not my space. In the basement, I was an alien. I still have yet to stop feeling like a guest in someone else’s home each time I visit.
Meanwhile, my mother moved for a second time and told me I could not keep any plastic bins with her. There would be no space for my things or for me.
A year and a half ago, I moved five hundred miles away to New York City to make a new life for myself. Six months ago I stopped speaking with my mother. I am certain I still have a few remaining belongings scattered through her apartment: my first editions of the Harry Potter series, a skirt I purchased with my grandmother in Boston ten years prior, and a costume I wore while competing in a one-act show. These items, while sentimental, will probably never be retrieved. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel emotionally safe enough to enter her space and take them back. And if I did somehow manage to find the courage to go back, I don’t know if those items would still be there.
I’ve built a place for myself for the first time. I leased my first apartment, started my first full-time job, and bought my first bed. I pay my bills, and I have a place to put my knick knacks, my old jewelry box, and framed photos. I no longer have to worry about where I can store my things as I wander from place to place.
Almost all of my important possessions are with me in New York. I have my grocery store, where the cashier and I still joke about the need for ice cream in every trip. I know which vendor has the best deal for iced coffee and which bars have the best Wi-Fi. I have a routine. At the end of the day, I have a place that is mine.
When people ask me where I come from and where “home” is, I still reply with Michigan. That it’s the easy answer, but it’s not really true for me anymore. True, it’s where I spent my formative teenage years. It’s where I made many of my friends and where much of my family still lives. It’s where my father taught me how to drive, and I learned how to take care of myself. I learned how to be a better writer and how to bake cookies that are perfectly golden yet chewy. It’s where I fell in love for the first time and where my heart was broken.
When I visit, I still love the feeling of driving down I-96 past empty fields that span miles, chasing the sunset. I even love that feeling of driving pass the local strip malls and turning into my former neighborhood, the neighborhood of our foreclosed house, passing wide open front lawns until arriving at my destination. I will always miss walking through the front door to see my parents laughing together in the kitchen — my mother in the kitchen cooking dinner and my father at the table drinking a glass of scotch.
Soon I’ll be packing my bags and heading to the airport to see my father during the holidays. Though I’m giving my father some peace of mind and giving him that sense of family, it isn’t the same for me. The holidays don’t make Michigan feel like home, and neither do broken remnants of my former life.
One day, as I grow into adulthood and grow to understand myself, I will have my own family and my own space. I will settle into a life with predictable unpredictability. I will have a place that I can call home.
