I skipped Christmas in the south last year, had Christmas Eve with friends and Christmas Day with my sister (and more friends) and I didn’t regret not going “home.”
People my age who still refer to going to our parents’ as “home”—serious question—when does where we make our lives feel like home?
I’ve moved so much in my life, hopped from state to state, that for a time my parents’ house was home. And I lived back here as an adult, but I hated it and spent those three years planning my escape.
So now, I have escaped, and more than that, I’ve built a life. I’ve been nearly two years in one apartment and though I still need to hang more art and the lovely mirror that I got from my grandmother it is home to me. And more than that, home is where my friends are more than where my parents are.
I haven’t even tried really to see anyone else while I’m here and I doubt I will. I just don’t have the energy. Instead, I am in bed at 9:20 and pleasantly wine-buzzed and have only seen my mother cry once and only had one argument escalate beyond Things I Can Handle. And it didn’t even flush my cheeks or spike my heartrate. Guess that’s for other things to do, now.
I spent Thanksgiving with my chosen family, spent the weekend with people I love, and it’s not that I don’t love my parents, it’s just that if this was ever home it’s not anymore, it was never where I’m from (I get more sentimental rolling into Boston, in whose suburbs I was raised a pissed-off goth girl).
It wasn’t much of a Christmas this year, really—I gave donations instead of gifts for most people and I felt OK about that—a year in which I spent so much of my time worrying about money myself or running around in the streets chasing the nascent #classwar didn’t seem like a year to spend money on trinkets that say “I love you.”
I said to Melissa today that another person we both know will never know the pleasures of real friendship, the kind of deep and hard love that survives fights and grows stronger during crises, the kind that trusts and holds out comfort on offer whenever, the kind that doesn’t add up favors owed and done and given or simply collect people because of what they can do for you.
As the year winds down I’m thinking back on the surprising gifts it gave me, some of them tiny and some of them so huge I wonder that I don’t deserve them. Or what I can do to continue to deserve them.
But the biggest one is knowing, without a doubt, bone-deep and heart-sure, that where I live now is home, that the people surrounding me are just the ones I want, that the life I clawed and fought for is here, and if it’s not perfect (whose is?) it is right and I am lucky to have it and to have everyone who is in it.
(Even my parents, though their house is not and never will be again “home” to me.)
