I.
As a child, my family would always come together for holidays at our house. My aunts would fly in and my father would get my Nana from church to bring her to our house.
I’d watch my mother conjure up an entire feast for holidays. She would prepare weeks in advance for what to feed us. She gave all of her care to cooking, plating, and cleaning her way to a masterpiece that’d be packed away in Tupperware and foil plates not hours later. We’d eat pie watching reruns of the Macy’s Day Parade for Thanksgiving. On Christmas, after attending an early morning sermon, we’d watch the A Christmas Story marathon on TBS all day while opening gifts.
I’ve watched that movie every Christmas, all day for 23 years.
I’m not watching it tomorrow.
II.
In three years, I’ve moved four times. My mother calls them new beginnings and tells me:
“It doesn’t matter where we are. Family is all you need to have a home.”
“God never gives us more than we can handle.”
“He gives the toughest battles to his strongest soldiers.”
When things get rough, there are always lessons to be learned. No hardship is fought without reason or just because the universe felt like choosing to hurt you. It gives the pain a sense of purpose rather than mindless cruelty. It comforts my mother to praise God when another burden is lifted from her shoulders. I wish she would give just as much reverence to herself.
As I’ve grown older, I think the lesson from all our new beginnings is much simpler and a bit more morbid.
Things get lost.
Among the missing are the following: a stuffed animal left behind in a storage unit, sweaters pawned off to relatives, a twenty-year-old wine collection gets gifted to kind strangers on the road, and whatever else can’t fit in a moving van.
Can there be any sense of home when all that was in it is gone?
We move right before my junior year of high school. We move again before my senior year is done. During my winter break my sophomore year, I come back to an apartment I’ve never lived in. All of what little things I’ve left behind are still packed away in boxes.
There is nothing of me here in the open.
III.
My mother’s one-bedroom apartment is small but undeniably her own. After all those years of not quite having anything that wasn’t given to her with strings attached, she has this space that she and my sister call home.
What has survived all the moving is, at first glance, nothing to be treasured. There’s an old grandfather clock that is not only broken but too large for the space. It was found at an antique store in Georgia and towed home in her old Honda Odyssey held tight by bungee cord and a prayer. There’s a big metal pot that as a child seemed larger than life on the kitchen countertop. Now, it survives in her cabinets being pulled out for large batch curry with red beans and rice.
It is fragile to attach memories to objects. I know how things disappear but my memory alone is an unreliable narrator.
My mother is once again standing over the stove. There’s no feast or weeks of preparation taken for this meal. She’s making two small batches of curry. One with meat and one she has learned to make for me, the vegetarian. There’s just her, me, and my sister after she’s worked a short shift on Thanksgiving. I’ve come home from college for the week. I’ve got my own apartment that doesn’t kick me out during the holidays. After the new year, I have to go back to work.
She’s never been a material person and it makes her both reckless and righteous.
She’ll always say, “I can’t take it with me when I go.”
I think about what home I will have when my mother’s gone.
IV.
This is the first year I’m away from my family for Thanksgiving and now Christmas. The past few months have been spent in ritual solitude, the world shut away. At promptly 3 pm, I facetime her and my sister for our weekly call while looking up what the internal temperature of a properly cooked whole chicken should be.
I spend my day making dinner in my kitchen and playing my mother’s favorite music as loud as my little speaker will let me. Like her, I’ve planned this meal days in advance and prepared a cooking schedule that takes into account oven temperatures and cooking times all so my roommates and I can eat exactly at 5 pm. We don’t eat until 7 and there’s far too much food for three people. I enjoy the fruits of my labor with my roommates and finally feel home.
It’s a bittersweet revelation. I’m thankful to have a roof, food, and community outside of my family.
I mourn how long it took, how hard it was to get here, and how young I was when I started building on my own.
I celebrate that it’s built and doesn’t exist in just the physical.
I’ve begun to root my home in moments. All the people, places, and things exist in my moments and make it whole. Creating this home has made me whole again. I am nowhere near done with building.
V.
For this Christmas, home has become a very small, second-hand dining table and a beaten metal pot that’s now been passed from my mother to me and will surely survive long after we are gone.
Write where you are happiest spending your time. For example, it can be in your room while in bed, outdoors (please with a coat depending on where you live because it’s cold), or with a person. Before you begin writing, think about why you chose where you are. I suggest scanning the space, closing your eyes, and taking three deep breaths. Take 4 seconds to breathe in through your nose and four seconds to breathe out through your mouth. Remember to write for yourself.
Can I describe what home looks like without describing where I live? Where do I feel safe? Where do I feel my most genuine self?
Make a list of the things in the space that you are writing in. It can be as concrete or arbitrary as you like.
Assign each thing on my list a lesson I’ve felt that I learned this year. How are the thing and the lesson connected?
What hopes do I have for a home that I’ve built?
A special thanks to all my readers. I hope you enjoyed the first issue. As Be Soft, Write Feral grows, I hope you grow with her. May you see that your writing is as amazing as you are.
An extra special thanks to Kaitlyn. The sweetest there ever was for her endless support.
This essay is really special. It feels like you, like your presence is in it. Like I can hear your voice reading it. I know that's kind of the point, but I just wanted to say that I believe you succeeded. Also, I cried reading the poem.