Thanks for my homes

Ok, this one hurts a little...

I love the book Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, a childhood memoir written in verse. Her mother was from South Carolina, and while they ultimately moved to New York, Jacqueline spent her childhood traveling between both places.

From “halfway home #1”:

...

Right now, our mother says,

we’re only halfway home.

And I imagine her standing

in the middle of a road, her arms out

fingers pointing North and South.

I want to ask:

Will there always be a road?

Will there always be a bus?

Will we always have to choose

between home

and home?

I feel this deeply. But for me it’s not North and South, it’s East and West. I lived my first seventeen years in California, plus a few college summers. I lived in Utah during college and grad school, about six years. Matt and I have lived with our children in Virginia for fourteen years. 

During those years we have traveled “home” often. More often than anyone else we know. Our kids have been on dozens of plane rides and a few cross-country road trips. Before the pandemic hit, I was starting to feel pretty good about this traveling life where we can visit the West as often as we want while still living in the East.

We have talked and continue to talk about moving West, but East continues to be the right place for us... for now. It’s far from settled, especially since we want to move to a slightly bigger house to better fit our growing kids; we just don’t know where that house will be. 

In many ways I actually love feeling this bicoastal tug, but in other ways it has me weepy sometimes. Regardless of any perfect world where I might not “have to choose between home and home,” this is the real world and it’s the world we chose fourteen years ago and keep choosing every day. Both places are home. I’m thankful for the perspective that having multiple “homes” gives us and our kids. I’m thankful for the dozens of people I love dearly who inhabit our “homes” and who have shaped me and shaped our family.