My family moved around a bit when I was growing up. Before I began fifth grade, I had lived in three different houses, in three different corners of Ontario: a Cape Cod on a country road in Belleville, with an unfenced backyard and a mailbox at the end of the driveway; a newly-built back-split in Bowmanville, on a winding, suburban street with more kids around than trees; and a three-bedroom side-split in North Bay, a stone’s throw from Trout Lake.
Each of those times we moved, it was because my father had got a new job—not because we had family there, or any other connection to the place itself. So for me, a deeply introverted dork, the excitement of each new house was always heavily outweighed by the agony of being the new kid in town, trying to fit in with the kids who already lived there—kids who belonged there, in a way I never would. It was their home town, not mine. I’d never really have one.
The year I moved to Waterloo for university, my parents and siblings left North Bay for my mother’s home town of Sault Ste. Marie, where they bought a massive four-bedroom, four-bathroom house. I had a room there, as did my grandmother after my grandpa died. I spent my school holidays there, but never moved back home—and a few years after I graduated, my parents sold that place and moved again. Twice.
These days, they live in a beautiful, spacious condominium with an indoor pool, ten minutes from my house by car. Though I often feel like an overgrown kid in their company—when my mother brings me a hot bowl of turkey soup, or my dad is working on my tax return—I never feel as though I’ve gone home, when I’m there. I’m just at my parents’ place, which really isn’t quite the same thing.
However, in every place I’ve ever lived, no matter how strongly I felt that I didn’t truly belong there, I always had the incredible luxury of looking like I did. I was just another white kid. I spoke English with no discernable accent. No one ever asked me where I was from.
Well into my teenage years, I envied anyone who still lived in the place they were born, or whose families and friends still did. I wanted a place in the world like that, that I could leave whenever I wanted but would always be there, just waiting to receive me again. A place where I truly belonged, didn’t just look like I did.
I still envy anyone who has a place like that, though of course I now know, such places are far more rare than I once thought.
In Tell Me How to Be, Akash must return to the luxurious suburban home in which he grew up, an empty nest his mother is preparing to sell, now that she is a widow. As he packs up his childhood bedroom, Akash revisits the experience of having been both Hindu and gay in small town Illinois, and begins to crack under the pressure of constantly performing and concealing parts of his identity in order to fit in—with the Hindu community, his white classmates, his best friend, and even his family.
Of course, like most children, Akash has completely failed to consider that his mother, Renu, is perhaps not the person she appears to be, either—that her performance has simply been more convincing, and her secrets, more easily kept. As the anniversary of her husband’s death approaches, she revisits their life together in Illinois, alongside the life she was forced to leave behind in London, twenty-odd years ago—the life she intends to pick up again, right where she left off.
This tender coming-of-age/coming-of-middle-age novel was recommended to me by
, as part of her Queer Your Year reading challenge. I would like to pay this rec forward to anyone else looking to fill in prompt #23---and everyone else, really.Like Renu, Isma is also determined to “go back to her life”—but she is making the opposite journey, from contemporary London to America. When we meet her, in the opening chapters of Home Fire, Isma has spent the last seven years raising her twin siblings, who were just twelve years old when their mother died, leaving them all with nothing but their home on Preston Road. Now that her sister has started university, and her brother has followed in the footsteps of their father, a charismatic figure he barely knew, Isma is free to give up the job she had hastily taken to support them, and finish the doctorate she once started—if she can make through the interrogation room at the airport. Isma’s family is both Muslim and British, constantly forced to prove their allegiance to one identity without disavowing the other.
Though she does not know it, Isma’s chance meeting with Eamonn Lone—the son of the British Home Secretary, a man with his own, deeply complicated ties to the Muslim community on Preston Road—will connect the two families forever, with devastating consequences.
It’s a beautifully written novel, which I devoured without knowing that it is a modern retelling of Antigone. Sorry if that spoils the end for those of you who love Sophocles.
I’ll never have a home town. But my kids do.
We bought this house when my twelve-year-old was a toddler, before her nine-year-old sister was born. They’ve only ever known one neighbourhood, gone to one school.
The day we went to pick up the keys, I clearly remember thinking that I’d be giving my own children the one thing I had wanted most, when I was a kid. All new parents dream of doing this, and I was going to achieve it, like, right from the get-go! I was unbelievably smug with satisfaction. Swaggering up to our front door, I swung the keys around my index finger like a cowboy in the wild west, twirling a pistol before pointing it at some varmint.
The really funny part is, in that moment and for years afterward, I thought my kids would appreciate it. Just like my parents must have thought, each time we moved. To them, each move was an upgrade in our circumstances. Each job was better, each house nicer, than the one before it. They were doing their best, to give my siblings and me the things they didn’t have as kids. As had their parents.
Sigh.
The only child involved in my purchase of this house, who could possibly appreciate what I was trying to give her, was my inner child. She’s the one the real estate agent made this deal with, really.
And guess what?
She wants to move.
Do you have a home town? Do you still live there, or do you ever go back? Have you driven yourself mad trying to give your children the home you always wanted, as a kid? Please, do tell.
On finding a place in the world
Lovely piece, Rosalynn. I like the way you blend your personal history with the themes of the books you've been reading.
This is a really freighted question/area for me. I have a hometown that comes with caveats. We moved there when I was ten. It is a small New England town with families who still, after more than fifty years, view my family as relative newcomers. I "came of age" here and still go back to visit because so many of my people and history are there. Still, there are other places where I feel at home. I struggled with all of that here, in a brief thing I wrote after going home for my father's memorial service: https://elizabethmarro.substack.com/p/finding-the-parts-that-remain.
I am constantly struggling with a sense of dislocation and a longing for home. I don't know why.
My son had to move many times because of me -- we were always looking for a better rent situation but I tried to keep him in the same town and school whenever possible. I feel a lot of regret about this. If I had it to do over (there's that fantasy again), I'd stay put in Rockport, MA until he grew up. I have this probably misguided idea that he would have had a safe place where everyone knew him and never felt lacking because he had only me.