For my first ever blog post I wanted
to talk about something simple, something that would allow me to dip my toes in
the water of this new medium without the risk of drowning in the depths of
complicated introspection. But, let's be honest, I am not very good at avoiding
complicated. So, instead I am going to just dive right in. Inspired by my
recent trip to California, I want to talk about what makes a place home.
In the expatriate community here in Milan we frequently refer to travel to
visits home. The literal meaning
conveyed is straightforward: home is our country of origin, in contrast to
Italy which is just our current place of residence. The emotional consequences
of this usage are quite profound, however, because it reflects an unchallenged
assumption that we are not at home here. If not an overt rejection of the
residence we share in common, the exclusion of Milan from the category of home
at least makes it more difficult to feel settled here. There is always a shadow
of impermanence over the events and relationships that make up our daily lives.
Yet, paradoxically, the longing for home and the vague sense of alienation in
our current environment are a unique bond that draws us together. So that those
with whom we might have little contact or little in common if we were back
"home" become allies who support us in our life lived away from home.
This contrast between residence and
home struck me in a new way on my recent trip to California with my two
children, but without my husband. It was on the 20+ hour trip from Milan to
Southern California that I made a passing comment to 5 year-old daughter about
going home. She gave me a quizzical look and asked when we were really going to go home, to New Jersey.
You see, while California is where both my husband and I were born and raised,
and is also the place that we have habitually referred to as home, Princess
Imagination has never lived there. Before moving to Milan we had lived in New
Jersey for 10 years, so our children both have birth certificates issued by the
Garden State. Princess Imagination's first confident steps were taken on the
stone path running along the side of our Belle Mead home, her first best
friends were from her toddler class at KinderCare, and she still frequently
talks about her "flower room", whose walls I painted to match her
first big-girl bed spread. Much as she loves to visit our family in California
(I promise Nanna & Gra'ma - she adores it!), for her, New Jersey is still the
place that offers her the sense of belonging and security that our exciting
expatriate experience lacks.
This realization that my home-compass
and my daughter's do not point in the same direction made me think a little
more carefully about what really makes someplace home. Place of residence is
not necessarily the defining characteristic. In a sense of legal residence, I
am caught in a vague indeterminate status between Milan (where my legal
residency has a specific end-date printed on my permesso di soggiorno)
and New Jersey (where we still own a home, which allows me to maintain the
legal residency required to access important rights and privileges like voting
and driving). The bureaucratic hoop-jumping related to maintaining this
dual-residency, if anything, alienates me further from both of these places.
But more than that, the time I have spent living in both of these places has
been overshadowed by that sense of alienation that I described above. Despite
residing in both places for extended periods of time, I have never quite felt
like I belonged. And this sense of belonging is, perhaps, part of what sets
apart a given place as one's home. This may be one of the few instances I have
encountered so far of English offering a more emotional vocabulary than Italian.
As far as I have been able to gather (although I can claim absolutely no
mastery of the Italian tongue), the same word - casa - is used in
Italian to cover the two English words house and home. But these two words
carry vastly different meanings. The common attraction of home among
expatriates involves less the physical characteristics of a given place (since
these places are different for all of us), and more this sentimental sense of
belonging. The understanding of home is grounded, at least for the lucky ones
like me, in nostalgic memories of comfort and security, where you know how life
works and where you will always be accepted.
Not long into my California trip,
and frequently throughout its duration, my two year-old son (the
Gigglemonster), further complicated my musings about home by getting
very un-giggly in response to home-sickness. It was no reflection on the loving
family members that welcomed us so warmly on our trip. Instead I discovered
that my extroverted, adventurous, happy little guy is really a homebody, and
for him, that means Milano. In large part, no doubt, the absence of Daddy on
our travels contributed to the Gigglemonster's uncharacteristic anxiety, but he
was also verbal enough about his distress to identify "my bed" and
"my house" as a big part of the "home" he was longing for.
If memories of comfort and security really are essential to our identification
with a given place as home, then the Gigglemonter's home is inevitably
Milan, because he cannot remember living anywhere else. But for me, there are
so many places that hold life-changing memories. My memories of childhood and
college are all located in California, but my adult life has been lived
elsewhere. And the experiences and learning I have had in New Jersey and Milano
are just as formative to my sense-of-self as were my early years. It would be
impossible to develop any scale that could even measure memories of getting delightfully
lost in Venetian back-alleys, and of pledging to love Tyler for the rest of my
life, and of holding my children for the first time, and of making homemade ice
cream with my Grandparents in their summer home in Mendocino. Much less could
any formula then calculate the relative weight or importance of these memories
in defining who I am and where I really belong.
Each of these memories does,
however, include members of my family, and perhaps here the Italian language
does help. When I looked up the Italian translation for home in
double-checking the use of the word casa, one alternative noun
offered was famiglia: family. At least for me, it is impossible to
imagine any definition of home that does not require the presence of my family.
Of course, I am one of the lucky ones. My own nuclear family, my husband and
our two precious children, are a source of daily joy, and they daily tell me in
words and deeds that I belong with them. But I have a much larger
"family" as well - by blood, marriage, faith and friendship, and
these connections also give me a sense of belonging, of being where I am
supposed to be when I am with the people who are in some way or another members
of my family.
This diffuse family perhaps finally
shines a clear light on why it is that I feel rather torn in defining one
particular place as my true home. My trip "home" to California
reunited me with many members of my family, but my husband was "back
home" in Milan. Even when we travel together to California for Christmas,
and we gather with many members of our families for holiday celebrations, there
are still missing elements: family members who are only part of past Christmas
memories, or loved ones with their own families. And there are memories of
other places, snow in our backyard in Belle Mead, the lights of Rockefeller
Center, the folktales of Baba Natale, that are now part of me but not part of a
California Christmas.
The three weeks in California have made me long for an
envisioned future when Tyler and I may finally call California home again in
the residential sense - when I imagine I will feel more centered and less
lacking in a home that feels permanent. But, on reflection, I don't know if
that will ever be true. An expat friend of mine has commented on her blog about
how she has "left a piece of her heart" in a number of places she has
visited while living in Italy. This breaking apart of one's heart sounds a bit
painful, especially if "home is where the heart is." For someone like
me, who longs for security, and grounded-ness, and belonging, it is a
bit painful. There is always an element of longing for the piece of home that
lives somewhere else, with a person or a memory that is physically located far
away. In my faith I have hope in a future where all this longing will be
fulfilled, and all those sources of love and belonging united in the One
Source. That is comforting. But in the here and now, it is also comforting to
realize that there is a benefit to the pain of being torn. If it is true that
home is where the heart is, and if a piece of my heart remains in so many
places and with so many people, then I am the furthest thing from home-less.
I am blessed with many diverse and welcoming homes.
