Going Home for Christmas
The burden of the expectations we set for joy in a rooted sense of place where our pain has soaked the ground below.
This time of year, many of us are visiting home for the holidays, which can be something of a fraught proposition. For some fortunate among us that may mean returning to a loving and supportive family, but for many it may mean at best a tense, awkward, or painful look at what we meant to leave behind, or at worst an outright abusive environment that we feel nonetheless forced to endure. For many in our community, what we once thought of as home may not feel as such anymore. Maybe home has changed since you have left, maybe it’s very much the same but you see it now through newer eyes. Through the eyes of someone older, the eyes of someone happier, the eyes of someone who has suffered more, or the eyes of someone who has known love that could not be imagined when you lived then in this place. No matter how you view it, there may be ways in which it pains you to take in and live within, even for so short a time.
I recently had this experience yet again, as I have to varying degrees the past few years. I saw my home, the family farm, in the brightest context yet, with someone I love dear, and as well devoid of the family I have always been there with. I went there with the expectation that my deep connection to that plot of land, my sense of place and purpose there, would overwhelm the history if the family I sometimes still struggle with were not present to recall the memories of a life under gemstone-forming pressures and in a body that in some screaming silent way I knew could not be mine. But I was wrong.
My few days in that place still ran me ragged, and left me wracked in turmoil for just as long after I returned. I find this both disturbing and disheartening, and feel a growing tension between
my urge to find a point of absolute stability, some kind of grounding in a known and familiar place, and my desire to escape that past and rid myself of expectations contained now solely in my soul which dog me still with every new embarkation I set out on. And in these feelings, I know I am not alone. When I have shared such things, be it in stories or in poetry or in a simple conversation, I have found so many others who agree, who feel the same, who relate to those same pains in ways they’ve struggled to articulate, but still see clear as day.
A year ago I wrote a piece about this, about the same experience a year before. Now, two years on, I find I don’t agree with everything I said back then, I feel I have a better sense for what was lost, but still I feel that it’s worth sharing, and preserving in it’s present state, rather then modifying it to fit my current understanding.
When was this place home.
You know these woods. These fields. You grew up among these trees. Was it home then?
It always was, until last year. Until new eyes gave new perspective. Until you were witnessed.
Did it really stop being home? You've told yourself that all year. But did it stop, or was it never home. Do you know what home is?
In your memory this place is green and lush, but time has bled the color from the land and bleached bare the house itself. The bright red walls a splotchy pink, skin the pallor of impending death. The deep dark green washed to an emerald grey.
Through fresh eyes, fresh perspective, by joining one without nostalgia for this place, your memories were forced into sharp relief. The broken equipment and piles of trash were no longer blemishes waiting to be erased, memories of hard work and eked out success. They were blotches on a landscape unchanged for the worse.
The fences have fallen down.
The sheep are long dead.
The animals you left behind still haunt this place. They always will.
Maybe it was home when they were here. If it ever was, it isn't now.
Your grandmothers room is bare. An office, a storage space, all traces of her presence scraped clean in the months following her death. The last time you went in that room she was alive. The next time you stepped through the threshold, the purple walls were painted white. the carpet gone for hardwoods. the furnishings all sold and given and stored away. Her spirit doesn't live here.
It's changed. It's nice, you guess. They've remodeled. They've redecorated. New furniture replacing old, unfinished spaces now complete. The farm is dead. The house lives on. It looks like something from a TV show. Or a magazine. It's very tasteful, you guess. It's not home.
The warm yellow light once spilled from the windows of this place in winter, golden warmth pouring over the snowy fields like warm molasses. To stand in the pasture and stare back to the house was a promise. It was unfulfilled. And now the new, harsher lights offer nothing but brightness. The soft edges are gone, replaced with a contemporary sharpness that severs the memories from this place.
Why do you care.
Why does it make you cry to see it change. To see it lost.
Why does it feel like it must have been home.
Why isn't it.
I don’t know what more to say here other then to state the fact that you are not alone. If you feel this way, you are not the only one, and there are people out there, in here, who understand. This time of year is hard, especially for those among us who feel that they must show a face that isn’t theirs to people they have known all their lives, be it in the form of staying or retreating to the closet, or in the form of burying ones self emotionally to survive what feels increasingly obligatory.
That’s not to say it all feels bad. In some ways I look forward to this. The longer I go without a visit home the more I can convince myself that strange and unexpected circumstances lead me to the way I felt last time. That this time, this visit, will be different. But the doubts I have of this are growing, and with this most recent time I feel convinced that this is, perhaps, not the grounding that I wish it was. Not the home I’ve always wished for it to be.
You are not alone in feeling conflicted. In loving the people who failed to realize or to help you when you were younger. In looking forward to returning to a place that hurts you. In expecting something still to be there when it’s not. In imagining it changed in ways it never will. We enter this place with hopes and dreams and expectations for a better future, and those can not always be met. You are not alone in wanting more, in wanting better, and you are right that you deserve it. But it will not be built in your absence.
Now is as good a time as any to make new traditions for yourself and those you love. To find new place and purpose in this time, and find a way to celebrate that looks towards the future, instead of dredging up your past. For what it’s worth, those who love you will try. For all their faults, my family is celebrating something else this year, in an attempt to move away from the burdens christian faith may place on those I love. It’s not perfect, but it’s movement forward. I hope that if you feel the same as me, if you resonate with these same struggles, you may as well move in this direction along side. Christmas was once about a new beginning. Let us each invent our own.