I have had the honor and pleasure of mentoring and thinking with Jennifer Bitterly* about the idea of Home. For Jennifer it was often geographical, but not really. For me home and home-ness is absolutely genealogical and permanently disrupted.
I am feeling my way through the language here, but I believe that dislocation, Jennifer's term, is the best description of where I am in relationship to concepts and constructs of home and family. One of the first things that Jennifer talked with me about was her feeling of dislocation, this inability to settle when moving from place to place - home to school - study abroad back to school, etc. We problematized together the concepts and constructs of home and family as both privileged and inaccessible possibilities. In the West - for middle/upper middle class folks in particular, we often fail to recognize that these things are not consistent nor constant. We fail to understand that the solidity of home is an intentionally engineered truth. I am starting to understand that the idea of home is ... a construct. Home and home-ness are socio-political constructs and are subject to all of the characteristics thereof.
I do not have a home. I have lived that reality since I was in elementary school. I can remember the house, and the people I lived with, presenting as a place to escape from. I experienced the house I was raised in and the people I lived with as temporary - temporal - not fixed in time or space... liminal. My adoptive mother made no secret about the thinness of my connection to her and to the place, this home ... her home. She would tell me directly that I could be thrown out, replaced, returned ... my adoption, my place or role as her daughter, was also liminal. My belonging had a timeline - it was not infinite.
A mixture of poverty, life decisions, young motherhood, eviction, social services and bad relationships placed my adult life in a cycle of regularly changing places to dwell. I can remember moving in the middle of the night with our stuff in garbage bags. I can remember furniture I could not replace being abandoned. In that kind of flight from and/or to home(s) one not only loses place, one loses time and memory - both physical memorabilia and memories lost to trauma and disassociation. This moving from home to home, place to place, people to people, becomes HOW you live. The moving becomes the living ... the survival. Home no longer has meaning beyond, maybe, who you live with.
I got to a point where I could no longer sit still or stay in one place for more than a few years. I didn't know how to make home in new places. Home-ness became about people both in its attractiveness and in its repulsiveness. Chasing and/or running away from home, home-ness and ultimately family became an obsession. I sought these things in lovers, friends, communities and jobs. I had apartments that I tried to make homes and landlords that I tried to make family. And when things got really bad, I ran. I ran from my adoptive mother when the physical violence became unbearable. I ran from intimate others when they were drunk and life threatening. I sat in cars with my little boys waiting for each storm to pass. And then, I always went back - because it was home.
When I left the community where I was raised in upstate New York, I finally found a shape to what home might look like. I moved with a partner, a serial abuser, who made home-making impossible. Homes, I came to realize, cannot be built on lies and deception. There was a way that he kept home unstable, chaotic, painful, violent and untenable. He was raised in a home with two parents and siblings. They fostered and adopted. He understood both the value of the security of home and the power of controlling someone else's home-ness... just like my adoptive mother. Home can be revoked.
When that relationship ended, my daughter and I made what was to be my first home. It was a home without conditions beyond the rental agreement. Memphis, Tennessee, the south, the delta was filled with all kinds of humans who had various fraught, beautiful and deep relationships with home and family. A city in the deep south on the slave making Mississippi River offered a landscape to think about home, family, loss, genealogical inheritances/disruptions and the finding of self. The rich histories of slavery and its violent denial of home and family provided language and context for the/my instability around home-ness and home-making.
It wasn't until this last move to Maine, where home was completely undone, that I intentionally "made" home. This is the first place I have ever lived where there are pictures on the wall. Those pictures, and the memorabilia, are my only connection now to intimate others. It is the first time I have lived alone in 29 years. My youngest child is at college. My other children are married and parenting. Everyone is at least five hours away. I had no choice but to create space to hold them in and through ... home now resonates as the things in my new house. And I feel comfort in that. There has been a grounding in decorating the house. I am, for the first time, performing... practicing... experiencing... connecting to home-ness - the creation of home.
I cannot articulate or convey the deep, unrelenting, guilt and pain I feel around the reality that I could never do that for my children. That failure, a truly maternal failure, is this deep, immeasurable, constant ache. I was never able, nor really conscious enough, to create and sustain a home for my children. The one thing a mother should do. The single most important thing that no one did for me. This is our genealogical inheritance of home-less-ness and the genealogical disruption of existing in unsafe, inaccessible, temporal, unstable and violent home-ness.
Adoption, no matter how "good a family" one ends up with, is the commodification of relationship, space, motherhood, parenthood - of home - and of genealogical disconnection. Adoption is slavery. Maybe. But it certainly is the exchange of human beings in and out of familial location against their will... without our permission. Like slavery. And like slavery, especially when the adoptive family is unstable, there is a perpetuation of the severing of relationship to home. Adoptees, or anyone really, are not taught to make home or evolve into home-ness. Adoptees ... arrive ... like furniture. There is no inherent connection to home. Home is a construct and in constructs there are power dynamics. There are a set of permissions. There is a permanent liminality. There is never... home.
More soon...
Baby Girl
*Jennifer Bitterly is a 2018 graduate of Rhodes College and a 2018-2019 Watson Fellow https://news.rhodes.edu/stories/jennifer-bitterly-18-wins-prestigious-watson-fellowship
