Home is Where We Are

My two-year old son has the most amazing and endearing trait of honoring his body’s internal clock, so daily around 11:30 am and around 7:30 pm, he tells me that he’s tired and ready to go to bed. Except on this particular night, as my husband loads our suitcases into the car, when my son tells me he wants to go to bed, I have to say no. For mothers, telling your child that he can’t go to sleep is completely counterintuitive. But on this night, we are taking the Jet Blue red eye from Portland, Oregon, to Brooklyn, New York. We are moving. Again.

            Three and a half years ago, my husband and I stood in our kitchen in Denver, Colorado sharing an afternoon coffee press of coffee and talked about what we wanted. We didn’t want to live our lives by default; we wanted to live our lives intentionally, lives that we created. We wanted a child; we wanted to live abroad and travel; we wanted careers we loved.

            “Alright” my husband said. “Let’s go live abroad.”

            And with that, we began our nomadic phase. My husband found work on a project in Singapore. I got pregnant. We moved to Los Angeles for the Research and Development phases of the Singapore project. Our son was born. When our son was 11 months old we moved to Singapore. When the project ended six months later, we moved to Bali. Five months later, we went back to LA, and then up to Portland for an eight-week stay with my family. My husband found a series of projects to work on in New York City beginning in December. We packed our bags once again, having traded our summer Bali clothes in our storage unit for our winter sweaters, boots, and coats.

            So when my son asked to go to bed, and I saw the puzzled look on his face when I told him that we’re not going to bed, I instead asked him if he wanted to go on a plane.

            “Yeah!” He hollered and ran for his coat.

On the plane, he sat excitedly in his seat, buckled in and announcing to all his fellow passengers that we were all on a plane and that we were going to go up up up. As soon as the plane took off and the seat belt light turned off, my son turned to me and said, “I want to go home and I want to go to bed.”

            This began a refrain that echoes over our first week in Brooklyn. As I put him to sleep the first couple of nights in Brooklyn, he said again, “ I want to go home.”

            It is one of those moments that as a parent, I don’t know what to say. I loved our time abroad, the people we met, the experiences we had, and the things we learned – about ourselves, and the world in general. I loved our time in Portland and with my family, but I too want to go home. I want a home; I want our home.

            I try to explain that it will be awhile yet, that we are subletting then we’ll be house sitting for friends, then subletting, then house sitting again, and subletting again. After that we will find a place to live that will be outs.  It turns out this isn’t the thing to say.

            “Home.” He said again, starting to cry.

            “I know,” I said. “This is home for now. Mommy is here, daddy is here, and you’re here, so we’re home. Home is where we are.”  I think of the joke that my husband and I have, that home is where our luggage is.

            But I start to tell my son the things we do to create home where ever we are - that at night, we have a bath, a book and bed. In the morning we’ll have breakfast and play, and before nap time we’ll go to the park or library or children’s museum. I tell him we will play trains and when we go for a walk, we will count the trains, buses and dogs we see just like we did in Portland. I tell him that after nap we will have snacks and teatime.            

            This recitation of our routines becomes the lullaby that ends up lulling both of us to sleep, and I realize too before nodding off, that while I miss my things, my coffee mugs, my books, and the ability to have a magazine subscription, that home is where we are, and the routines and rituals we create with each other.