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Which Way Is Home? By Mary Roberts Henderson
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My daughter and I spent our first summer in Bloomington, Indiana mostly away from Bloomington—visiting friends and family in Chicago and Cleveland.
So when it finally came time to begin the process of getting settled in our new home, I found myself more often than not disoriented—confusing Evanston streets with Cleveland's, forgetting which stores belonged to which city and mis-dialing area codes. After a quick trip to the grocery store up the street, I found myself paralyzed in the parking lot. Do I turn right or left? Where am I again? Oh yeah, Bloomington.
Through sheer determination and overwork, Bill ticked off every one of his goals, each of which had been jotted on a piece of paper and placed in our family "God bowl": making Law Review, wining a judicial clerkship, and finally, landing an academic position at Indiana University. While Bill was enjoying the payoff for all his hard work, my biggest wish continued to elude me. Instead of a sunny locale free of the harsh winters I had lived with all my life, we were no further south than south-central Indiana. And starting over, again: map in hand, trying to the lay of the land, pumping the locals for their favorite grocer or dry cleaner, and everywhere I go, unconsciously searching for a familiar face where there aren't any.
It has taken months but I have finally stopped saying that I miss the big city and that I long for warmth. Lauren is happy in school, has many friends and fully enjoys living in a house again. But after three homes in five years, I can't help feeling a bit nomadic. It can be isolating to have so little history in a town where a good many people have spent their entire lives. I wonder when home will feel like home again.
Then it occurred to me that unlike others who have a lifetime of experience here, my home is less the place I live and more me. It's less about a city I identify with and more about an opportunity to craft my own way of living in it. I don't know where our lives will lead us. I no longer actively wish for a specific place—the ideal city—to call home, in part because I cannot know what's best for us. It's much easier to let life play out. For now, feeling at home means learning to be more comfortable in my own skin and happy where I am. From that perspective, it matters not where I live. And I take comfort in that.
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