Redefining Home

When I was young, this was what I thought Home was supposed to look like:

Several kids I knew in school seemed to have this sort of Home. A mom & dad who loved each other. Family outings together. Visiting grandparents. Maybe even a family dog.

Of course, growing up in an alcoholic family, my Home bore only a passing resemblance to the idealistic version. The house looked the same, but the family dynamic it contained was quite different.

So when I met my husband and his smiling happy family, I thought I'd hit the lottery. A happy family. Who love each other. No one's been in jail. None of them have had shock treatment for schizophrenia. Nope, no suicides, not even in the extended family!

Then, after sixteen years together, my husband announced he didn't want to be married to me anymore. Just like that. It was done. All the talk about growing old together. An imagined life fading into the sunset? Poof.

Of course, there have been a lot of adjustments along the way, but the current struggle is to redefine what Home means now.

It's possible that old definition still exists for other people. I see it around me every day. True love. Commitment. Promises made and kept.

But I've just been given at least one example the concept is fallible. And, having suffered the devastation that revelation carried in its wake, one example is quite enough, thank you. Is love and companionship still a possibility in my future? Of course. But I can never un-know that promises made -- important promises -- can be broken. More than broken… shattered.

And so I look around at the world, and I find myself awed and inspired by the ways in which we humans have learned to redefine the concepts of Home and Family. Unlike the families of fifty years ago, a Family is no longer just blood relatives. Or marriage. Our Families these days are the people we choose to surround ourselves with, those who love and support us, and give us strength, as we do the same for them.

Not to say Family can't also contain conventional concepts like Husband or Wife, and Son or Daughter. But it could instead (or additionally) be a Life Partner (no marriage needed), or Close Friends to share a glass of wine and good conversation and laughter. Many of us, it seems, have through choice or consequence discovered that living alone -- that is to say, without continuous human partnership -- is the most preferable option. But that's not to say our Home is any less loving or fulfilled than it used to feel to me as I would turn my key in the front door, anticipating the embrace of my husband.

Nevertheless, while I know this alternative concept of Home is possible, and maybe even desirable, it's still a shift in thinking. And, for me, it's not one that comes easily. I don't know if it's because of cultural bias and its definition of Home, or that old reptilian brain and its biological imperative, or just because I, personally, truly enjoy a Life shared, a partnership, and so do feel acutely its loss and absence.

But I also realize flexible thinking is another of mankind's greatest gifts. And if one remembers the old adage:

… then Home can be anything I love, with my true heart. And for now, I am ever so grateful to have good books, and good friends, and dry firewood, and a full wine closet, and fuzzy slippers, and "gently worn" flannel sheets, and the quilt my mother and I made together some forty years ago. And these guys:

So, for now, this is my Home. And I could do worse.