Friday Things // 02.18.2022
The one about what it means to go home again.
Hi friends! Writing to you today from my parents’ house, where I’m in town visiting for a few days.
I’ve had this phrase stuck in my head this week: “You can never go home again.” People like to say that, or some version, to college-bound students… like, “Take a good look, because this <<gesturing to their childhood home>> will never totally feel like home again after your first year away!”
I remember someone saying that to me when I went off to college, and I didn’t really get it. You can’t go home again? Why the hell not? It never ended up quite ringing true for me, despite loving college and adulthood. I always felt right at home going back to my parents’ place, even after I was married and had clearly made a home for myself in southern California.
And then, my mom died.
If you’ve been reading my rambles here on Substack for a while now, maybe even from the beginning, then you know I lost my mom very suddenly to cancer in the summer of 2020. It’s part of why I started The Yay Club. Anyways, since then, I have struggled with this feeling of not only losing a part of myself, but also the sense of losing a part of what I considered “home.” With that has come an internal struggle with the actual act of having to return here — to the city/state where she passed away. It’s a place where I lived for high school and routinely traveled back to for holidays and for visits, and yet I have an averse reaction to even the idea of tapping a toe on state lines here anymore. When she was newly gone, I remember being unable to wait to get out of here and back to LA. If I could have burned this city to the ground for its part in my mom’s death, I would have.
1.5 years later and not much has changed in that regard. I still don’t like being here without her, not in this state, nor in this house. I feel incredibly guilty saying that out loud because, you know, my dad is here. He’s here, and I love him, and I always want him around. But, it’s complicated. It’s hard for me to be here without my mom, and the cocktail of enduring grief and politics and pandemic-ing have made it all so much harder.
I never actually lived in this house, as my parents moved here after I was already out of college and living elsewhere, so it only felt like home when I came to visit because of my mom and dad. And while my dad is still here, thank God, there’s an emptiness to the house, both literally and figuratively, that makes it difficult for my bones to feel settled any time I’m here. I cannot rest here. I can’t let my guard down. It’s become the place I waited for my mom to come home to; the place where I was woken up at 7am to a nurse telling me she was dying; the place where I sat in shock for hours in a metal chair in the backyard after returning from the hospital that last time, til my husband brought me a sandwich and urged me to eat something. It’s the place my mom is never, ever coming back to, no matter how long I wait, or how many photos of her my dad puts up around the house.
Empty, empty, empty.
And so, now I suppose I do understand that phrase.
“You can never come home again.” No, I guess you can’t, not really. I guess it was meant for people grieving, not college kids.
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On that note, sending you all love this weekend! I hope you make the most of it, whatever that means for you. You’ve got this. xo
Thanks for reading!
Joelle