When I was growing up I often got asked by adults if my family was in the military. It seems like an absurd question now, as if entire families could enlist. I understood it, though, because the man my mother was married to had once been a Marine, and having been dishonorably discharged, had never gone through the civilian training that adapts them back to “normal” life, if they had that back then, and so my siblings and I were raised with a heightened awareness of this country’s foreign policy and how we should basically bomb the fuck out of everyone. Charming people, our parents.
Anyhow, the reason adults around me, mostly school faculty, asked me that was because my family moved very often. I estimate that we hardly lived anywhere for more than a year. Often it was much less, and I know this because there were school years that I went to multiple schools in a single grade. And it wasn’t because of the military, we were just poor. Or unskilled at life. I don’t know, I wasn’t really participating, just ambiently learning how to not live in one place for very long.
This would continue for me into my mid-twenties. After I was kicked out of home in high school, I still managed to attend two more institutions (separate halfway houses for teens) after I was asked to leave school for being homeless. I’ve attended classes at four community colleges. And until recently in my life I hadn’t lived in the same place (house address) for more than two years.
I’ve lived in my current home for three and a half years.
I suspect that it is having a strong subconscious effect on me that we have to move. And I can’t sleep without having terrible dreams. Which is why I am writing this at 5:26AM.
After my mother fled her husband, I think I gave up on the idea of a permanent home. As in, when I think back on when that comfort of “home” faded in me, it was sitting in the back seat of a station wagon, as two toddlers sleep quiet and sweating on either side of me. The excitement and relief of fleeing such a violent place dislodged that part that yearns for a place to return. Or so I thought. For over two decades I had no inherent sense of what people talked about in drunken oratories on how much they miss their home, or the various scenarios played out in movies and tv.
Then I met Clover.
I had thought it was cliché, because why else would it be in a movie, but the closest thing I ever heard describe how I feel is from the movie Garden State, when two people are chatting in a swimming pool about belonging, and one mentions something like, “Maybe that’s all home is, just our collective memories of a place we used to know, and the reason we start families is to somehow capture that again”. It was subversive and alternative enough to give me pause, but I didn’t really think it was how I felt, because I didn’t want a family.
Susan and I came a long way before deciding to have a child together. Ours has been the most defining relationship in my life, and I’ve grown by jumps and starts since being near her. I like to think that we have vastly different personalities, and that is part of why we jive so well, because we are like puzzle pieces that show different parts of the picture, but fit together to create a whole. Over time I know that we’ve gone on to influence each other fundamentally, and with some shame I admit that I am a better, kinder person for it. I don’t think I am an ongoing burden to her, but I can scarcely think of a day where I don’t feel compelled to apologize for having to put up with me; something that many folks don’t understand is that eccentric, outlier-types, we know we are such, because everyone points it out. It would make sense that we clutch to the rock that can withstand our personality.
We came a long way, and because of our individual paths before meeting, and how our beliefs were reinforced through the example of our shared lives, we employed family planning and decided to have a child approximately seven years after initiating our intimate relationship. Seven years is the important bit of information for what I am talking about, and I am careful to avoid using terms like, “we held off for seven years” or “started a family”. Susan became my family the moment my heart let her in. We didn’t hold off on children, rather, we played it by ear and took assessment of our situation; it was an ongoing process, and not guaranteed to produce children. Though impossible to measure due to my inability to compare alternate realities, we could have sought our happiness/life-meaning elsewhere, like the variety of other countries on this planet, or the staggeringly varied and practically infinite amount of activities humans are capable of.
But we got to a point and wanted a babby, and I talked a lot about that, so back to the seven years.
When I started living with Susan it was under stressful circumstances, and I really should document them sometime, but will be unable for years to come. What I had presumed would be another in a string of displacements actually turned into my grounding, where each successive place we would live we would gather more people and live for as long if not longer than we had in the place just before. Not really a regret, but I wish I could have communicated to all our tribe members that put up with me during that time. They will never fully know how much it all meant to me, because even now I don’t fully know myself. But it meant a lot.
And at the beginning of 2011 Susan and I created a new family member. And along with a lot of other dislodged parts of my heart, that yearning for a home came back, shoved back into place by the little wet, pink ball I would stare at for hours.
I think that it is hard on me in navigating our current situation, because I fought so hard to be here. It isn’t easy for me to pay rent. I am fairly good at generating income, and have gotten a lot better in the last couple of years. But there are all these rhythms that everyone seems to sense that I don’t, like how money turns into home. I’ve transitioned to project-based work, and that has helped. Before, I charged hourly and would invoice for work that when paid, the people paying me couldn’t remember it: a month of hours at net 30 meant that folks would sign a check paying me for things I did 60 days prior. So I was never paying bills or for food, I was thinking about a future where the past will hopefully keep me warm and dry and fed. I was a time traveler from a world very different from the one around me.
Meeting Clover made me work smarter, and that continues to ripple through my life. And it also means that I am scared of what happens next. With every other stage of my life I’ve felt that the lowest I could hit, I could manage. If all else failed, I am always better equipped to deal with homelessness, of losing everything and starting over, than I was when I was 15. But that is a possibility that faded into ether when Clover joined the party, along with my ability to morbidly fantasize about losing everything in trying to mitigate the pressure of daily life.
I’ve heard that moving is one of the most stressful times for a person. I think this move is the first time I’ve resisted. Not in the sense that I don’t want to, but more like when you have to confront something, and it is on the other side of a door, and your body plays with the idea of not working correctly, and even though you will eventually grasp the handle and turn it, your arms take a long moment to do that simple action.
In the past a place where I lived was a growing burden on my unprepared shoulders, and I would leave it in a hurry, for less stressful places to linger.
Now, I need to move my home.