This Home Knows My Pain

and doesn’t judge

The feeling of home, for me, has changed.

No longer am I a child — feeling at home in the spaces where I play, eat, bathe, and sleep. At home with my possessions tucked neatly under my bed, posters I bought with my own babysitting money hanging on my wall, or my beloved bicycle parked carefully by the back door. It is no longer the place where I can hide in afternoon sitcoms or chase my annoying sister with a granddaddy long legs spider.

No longer am I a young, newly married woman trying to balance the newness of a career and the weight of a toddler on my hip. I’m not standing in line at Duke Power (now Duke Energy) and getting annoyed that the staff overlooks me to help other customers. I step to the counter and tell them I need to pay my bill — to their astonished faces, this child-like little woman with a baby on her hip has a bill to pay?

I am not that quiet doormat anymore, and my home is no longer that disheveled space I fought like hell to run like a real, grown woman. Sally Jesse Raphael on the television and some version of canned food cooking on the stove, a husband with dreams of owning his own junkyard passing through my life like a bad dream.

I am also not the woman anymore with a closed-door home, violence, and shame on the inside — the world passing by unawares on the outside. Friends on the outside. Authorities, ex-husband, responsibilities all on the outside of my closed-home door. On the inside of this home is a new husband, an angry one, one who isn’t happy that his wife is “used goods.”

I am not that woman anymore either and that home is only a figment of a memory, the birthplace of PTSD. I wish I could separate the dark memories from those of the laughter of my children when they were little. Somehow the ugly won’t leave the good memories alone. I try like hell to pick them apart but like vines they intermingle, one outgrowing the other.

My current home is also not my first house, the one I fell in love with and I fought with that angry man to buy. The one where I push-mowed the three acres alone while he played Game-boy and kept the remote tucked under his leg. Hope resided in the walls I painted myself — but died with the shadows that followed him. The memories of my two boys living there are part giggles — and part guilt.

The hope of that home should never have died. I should have never known the feeling of the kitchen floor against my tear-stained cheek. Even after he moved on and I was finally free, I fought until the bank claimed the property. “Thirty days to vacate” the pre-Christmas notice on the door had said.

Feeling at home — current day

Home is not a place. It is not a place at all — because I have prayed for, longed, for, begged the Universe for a house of our own to call a home. We settle now for this small rental trailer with a hole in the hallway ceiling and broken underpinning that won’t keep out the critters. The self-inflicted closed-door policy here isn’t very strict and only in place to save my pride.

When we have a house — one big enough for lovely furniture — store-bought, not second-hand — I’ll invite others to sit, to have tea, to watch a movie or spend some time with me. I’ll invite my mother over for dinner — cooked in a kitchen big enough to roll out biscuits. I’ll have a nice chair for her to sit in and talk.

Until that day home for me is this; it is the place where I don’t have to explain myself. I don’t have to “pardon the mess.” I don’t have to put on make-up (which, since I don’t have bruises or crying to hide anymore is now optional) or dress up my hair from “banshee-wild” to presentable, Mom-like.

My boyfriend made the statement a few years ago — “Being with you feels like coming home.” I’ll second that. We have made a home out of whatever we could put together and share.

I can be me.

Home is where I don’t have to explain the chronic pain. Those who live here with me, love me, see me, they know my pain and can tell usually by my walk if it is a good “I can get some things done today!” day or if it is a less busy, restful, perhaps quite miserable-pain day.

In my home these things do not have to be explained, justified, defended — this feels like home to me. Home is where I can be me, unapologetically. I can be loved. I can be alone if need be, and these walls that I do not own can cover me when I don’t want to be seen. The cheap trailer bathtub holds hot bathwater all the same, with or without a cup of Epsom salts.

The memories and laughter that fill these walls are mine (and I have not had to fight anyone for them, not anymore) and that, to me, feels like home.

This slice-of-life article is in response to the following prompt:

Christina Ward 🌼 is a poet and nature writer from North Carolina. Sometimes, she writes her life.