Home Is Not A Place

I think I was a nomad in a previous life. I hate being in one place for too long and I don’t feel like I have roots anywhere. Which is funny, because my husband and I just bought a house. I have the soul of a traveller; I am not meant to be still.

I wanted to post about this because last weekend, I was talking to my bonus bubs about things that I want to do around the house to make it more our style, and they asked why I didn’t do that in our last house. My response was, “well, it wasn’t our home” (we were renting). It took me a minute to realize that they didn’t quite get what I meant, and per usual, it turned into a deeper conversation. Sometimes my kids are way too smart for their own good. The conversation turned into if I felt like New Jersey was my home or if Georgia was my home, and I was honest with them… I don’t feel like I have one.

Home to me is not a place; I don’t have a home in the actual sense of the word. My “home” is my mom and my sisters, my husband and my children. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I felt like we moved a lot when I was super young. I was 6 or 7 when my family moved to South Jersey, but before that, we lived in Queens, Staten Island, and then Brooklyn; we moved back up to North Jersey in 2001, so if I had roots anywhere, North Jersey would really be the place.

For me, going home means going to where my family is. This is something that I think about a lot, more so since my father passed. I don’t get excited to go “home”, I know that sounds horrible when you say it out loud – I get excited to go and hug my mom, see my sisters, love on my nephews, and just be in that loved up space. But I don’t feel tied to the area in any way.

All in all, I guess my point is that home is not the structure, it is not the space between the walls, it is the people within them.