What is home? Is it a place, a person or a thing? Is it a state of mind? Is home where you feel comfortable, safe, secure and loved?
During my search for home I have found that home should not just be a house. In the last four years I have lived in six different spaces. I believed I was trying to find a new home that replicated the house in the neighborhood that I lived in with my now ex-husband and our two children for twenty-five years.
But, I have come to realize that it wasn’t a physical house. It was the people in it and creating the memories that would last a lifetime and the love and the holidays and the traditions that were created and customary year after year. It was family.
Now single and an empty nester, I went from living in that beautiful house to living like a nomad in apartment after apartment to temporarily living in a friends house and finally swallowing my pride and moving back in with my dad and mom in late winter of 2020. That was space number 5. I had planned to stay only a few weeks at the most to regroup and find somewhere permanent to live when Covid-19 changed all of our lives forever. A few weeks staying with my dad and mom turned into nearly two years. It appeared then to be a blessing in disguise but also a punishment. I read a lot of books and binged TV shows to pass the time, like nearly everyone else. And I sometimes stayed up all night writing pages for an unfinished memoir.
Living back home as an adult with mom and dad was much different than when I had lived with them as an adolescent. It was humbling and confining, like being a teenager who has to live by her parent’s rules under their roof. Well, maybe not that much different. I had had a home of my own for many years and liked my own living space and living by my own rules and having my freedom. But, I learned to adapt. And they did, too.
There was a silver lining. I was healing. It did not happen all at once. The grief I had been carrying of my recent past life with my family was giving way to acceptance. I learned to relax and realized that I was with my family, the one I grew up with. I was safe, secure and loved.
And then suddenly, the Winds of Change blew in, clearing away the dark clouds and allowing in the sunshine. The Pandemic was easing. Shortly after that I found a new safe and secure home of my own to live in and a new life to begin.
Leslie Sheridan 