By Abigail Rasminsky
What Place Do You Call Home?
Every July since my nine-year-old was born, I've taken my tiny family of three back to my hometown, Montreal, for a few months. Last summer we hadn't been back since she was six (pandemic and all) but we immediately fell back into old rhythms (long dinners with my parents, endless coffee dates with my oldest friends, summer camps in French) and new rhythms: we let Noa do much more on her own than she can in L.A., where we live. She'd walk across the street for croissants, down to the stationery store to browse, all the way to my parents' condo by herself.
One night, close to 10 p.m., on our way home from yet another supper en famille, she wanted to play in the park across the street from our rented house.
Sure, I said, and she slipped off into the night to climb the jungle gym.
I took out the compost through the basement door. Tuesday: compost; Wednesday: recycling; Friday: garbage. A city at work. Communal agreements. Piles on the curb. It was so quiet outside, so calm. I could live like this, I thought.
It took Noa a little too long to come back. Panic rose in me and I yelled out the front door for her to return. Coming! she yelled back. Nothing had happened; my mind had just flown off in fear for a moment. She was perfectly safe. She walked in the door, I sent her up to shower, and I thought of how many versions of a life one person can choose.
Like so many of us, the question of home rings more loudly over the summer and after Christmas because I return to where I am from (I think only of Didion's Where I Was From). Some part of me belongs most comfortably in Montreal — the two languages, the accents, the country itself — yet also feels an uncomfortable level of dissonance whenever I return.
For years — decades, really — everything felt claustrophobic and all too familiar: the faces, the parties, the stories. Provincial is what we all said to each other as we set off for New York and London and Berlin and Johannesburg. We lunged for our twenties and thirties in bigger places that could hold so much more of who we wanted to be. Places that would allow us to grow beyond the selves our city could hold or witness.
After college, I imagined myself nowhere other than New York, and for the 12 years I lived there, that vision never faltered. Its home-ness, its rightness, was not questioned. It didn't even change when my husband and I moved to Vienna, Austria, when I was 34 and spent the whole first year across the ocean wishing I was back in New York. I saw my life abroad as some sort of weird interlude, not the very truth of it. It took ages to settle in, to accept that the real thing — my real life, not the imagined thing I'd left behind — was quite good. I didn't know then that I'd never go back to being that young woman who only ever wanted to live in Brooklyn.
Last summer I went back to New York for the first time in five years, and there it was: my old life, in those same streets, and yet I didn't feel at home, not at all, even though it is still where I've spent the biggest swath of my adulthood. I peeked into my dilapidated apartment building with my best friends and it all felt like so long ago. A friend who lived through that period saw the pictures of me outside that door — the one I pushed open for nine of the 12 years I lived there — with nothing but a tote bag on my shoulder, and she said it made those years — our harrowing, hilarious twenties and early thirties, when we had nothing but the bags on our backs and the imagined weight of the worlds on our shoulders — come rushing back. Who were those people? What were they running after?
Every time I go home to Montreal (or, now, New York), I see how far my life has traveled from that city of my childhood and the other of my young adulthood. I say that not with any hint of snobbery or condescension. I spend most of our time wishing we did live in Montreal: the simplicity of it all feels spectacularly easy and sane after braving the traffic and freeways of L.A., the weekly American mass shootings, the ripping away of reproductive rights. The Canadian pace is slower, calmer. The summer is so green and lush. People sit out on terrasses and eat and drink. A friend once said, Montreal is full of Type B people, and I find this both funny and maybe true? And was also perhaps why at 18 I was desperate to leave?
What am I getting at here? Perhaps it is this: that "home" now feels like a fractured reality — many cities on a pie chart, each an incomplete sliver of a whole. Nothing substantial enough to outweigh the other parts.
This is where I should default to the sappy: home is wherever the heart is, or home is wherever you [cue: husband, daughter] are, a roaming (roving?) entity. But that's not what I'm searching for.
Yes, Montreal will always be where I am from: its frigid winters and terrible drivers and Franglish are in my bones. But if I am now talking about a self in a place, and I am unwilling to resort to the idea of family as home, then what? Can I accept that I will never again find The One Place that feels absolutely right? Where I am my most complete, whole, integrated self? Does such a thing exist?
That home will be drinking wine with my oldest girlfriends while our daughters, who barely know each other, play together like sisters in a park from our own childhood? That home will be sitting on a beach in L.A. with friends who will only ever know the adult versions of each other, but feel deeply, soulfully connected nonetheless? That it will be those walks along Smith Street in Brooklyn, coffee in hand, tote bag on shoulder? The number 13 bus in Vienna, the F train in Brooklyn, the Atwater stop in Montreal? That home will have to be all of it and none of it?
How about you? Do you have one or many places that you call home?
Abigail Rasminsky is a writer, editor and teacher, based in Los Angeles but currently living in Cambridge, England. She teaches creative writing at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and writes the weekly newsletter, People + Bodies. She has also written for Cup of Jo about beauty, marriage, teenagers, loss, and only children.
P.S. Home as a haven, and where would you like to raise your kids?
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What makes a home? What will make this place feel like home? What do you need to feel at home?
These are some questions this beautifully written post evokes within me. I want a home and to feel at home. Perhaps my answer lies in answering these questions for myself.
Sydni
Yessss have spent my whole adult life wrestling with this quote!! "Can I accept that I will never again find The One Place that feels absolutely right? Where I am my most complete, whole, integrated self?" My answer is no, not on earth. This CS Lewis quote points out we were made for another world, Heaven – "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world." <3
January 20, 2023 10:36am 10:36 am
Yes! So well described. I'm on my 4th country – 2 passports and a permanent residency. Grew up in a small East Coast city I also couldn't wait to leave asap for NYC. Also lived in Brooklyn for many years and still own a place there. Lived in Trinidad and Australia and now Hong Kong too. It's a confusing life. You mix up your slang and wordings and accents. You don't sound the same, American 'but not really'. You have to learn new cultural norms, make new connections. Nowhere feels exactly like home anymore. But also, we become very adaptable and open minded. We learn how to find a piece of home and comfort wherever we are. It's cheesy yes, but it becomes true.
January 18, 2023 1:17pm 1:17 pm
I think Manhattan rather accurately reflects how many of us experience home. Compare the enormous fountains and glassy skyscrapers that reflect them of Midtown with the charming, mysterious tree-lined blocks of Greenwich village (WHO exactly lives in those brownstones??). Compare the cobble-stoned, 9/11-harrowed serpentine neighborhoods in FiDi with the quirky, bar-filled stability of the East Village. Compare the gentrified, refurb glam of Meatpacking's luxe red pocket with the old-school sophistication, simplicity and soberness of the Upper East Side. My life feels like that: Each place I've lived has a distinct personality and flavor, but they all touch and ultimately bleed together to create one city, one home, one me!
Home has long been a complex and painful concept for me. While I was away at college, my parents abruptly and without telling me moved out of the only home I'd ever known. For most of my 20s I felt quite transient, trying with all my might to regain the concept of home but never finding it. Home now is a cozy cottage in Chicago full of love and security, delicious food, and cuddles from the world's best Golden Retriever and husband.
January 16, 2023 9:05am 9:05 am
This post reminds me of this throughline podcast on partition – https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142881052/road-to-partition
What a lovely thing to read as I prepare to move back (near) the town that has always felt most like "home" to me. To date, I have never lived more than five consecutive years in one house. But the place that felt most like home – my parents lived there 16 years. We moved while I was in high school, and it was the place I made my best friends, got my first job, learned to drive, had my first kiss, smoked my first cigarette, met the boy who would grow into the man who became my husband. After I moved away for college, I still returned "home" to my parents' house every summer, at Christmas time, and through the year. I graduated college and moved further away, to a big city. Still, I came home often.
After I'd lived in the city a few years, my parents divorced suddenly and unexpectedly. They told us kids in March, and the house was sold and gone in April. Both my parents moved away – my mom went far up north and my dad moved out of state. Both remarried and had new homes, but I was adrift.
Now, five years have passed, and my husband and I are returning to the area. His dad has since passed away, and his mom sold the family home they had there and moved. Returning "home" was so painful for so long. But I'm ready to return. We hope to have kids soon, and I hope to raise them in the same place that holds so many wonderful memories for me. I wish my family still lived there; it's a deep well of pain that my future kids will never go to my "childhood home." I envy friends whose parents have never moved, who still live in the same houses my friends grew up in. What a gift. But I also know I can create my own home for my own kids, a place they can always return to.
One thing I've thought about a fair bit is the question, what makes a home? The place you were raised? The place you learned how to be happy ? The last place you remember being happy, or free? It strikes me that those of us who have had nomadic lives, by fortune, circumstance, or some combination of the two, often frame our significant places as the multiple homes to which we feel connected. Sometimes it seems like there is a lot of pressure to anchor ourselves to these certain places because it gives us and our lives… I'm not sure. Meaning, I suppose. But what if they are just… places? Chapters? Some days, I truly feel I have multiple homes. Other days, none. I guess my question is, are they all homes? Or none of them? How do we make-and nurture- a home?
"Home" is Charleston, SC, the city I grew up in, where my parents, brother, and grandma still live. For college and 9 years after, Boston really became my home, especially as my relationship with my husband grew toward marriage. Now home is Memphis, TN but it doesn't feel like it other than our house that I love and share with my husband and our pup. I'm not sure if this city will ever feel truly like home in the way that Charleston and Boston do, but little by little I feel more settled.
Reply to Ellie
I just bought tickets to return to Memphis this summer with my husband and 4 kids. Seventeen years ago, we moved abroad when we got married with the intention of being gone for a couple of years before returning to Memphis. When I told the kids about the tickets, I said "We're heading home for a month this summer." And they laughed because they don't view it as home at all.
Hope you learn to love Memphis- it certainly has its quirks and charms.
Home has been mostly in the South: Florida and Georgia. But nothing has felt like home since my parents got divorced. I lived with my mom and we moved to a new house which she lived in until she moved to where I live now. I've lived outside of my hometown since 2005, only briefly living there in between breaks at college. My college town never felt like home and I was there for 8 years. I moved once more to a new town where I've been the last 9 years and it still doesn't feel like home. Home feels like such an impossibility. I don't really have much tethering me to my hometown but even where I've lived for the past decade feels foreign and temporary.
Siheme Sebaa
Home will always be Paris, but I found a place to be and exist in Quebec, Abidjan, West Palm Beach and Washington DC so far. One day, I was very sad to be away from my sisters and missing all the things (family events, friends' weddings etc). One of my sisters told me in a conversation where I was kind of complaining of the distance: "You chose to leave". I let that sink in. I was mad and sad at first. These words hurt my feelings. And then I realized, she was absolutely right. I CHOSE TO LEAVE and sometimes I feel sad I left, but I also realized that I will never regret my choice. The life experiences, the lessons, the people I met, are what made me the person I am today.
Nataliya
Omg I haven't felt so seen as a I read a piece of writing as I did right now. I grew up in Pakistan, moved to the US 16+ years ago. Feel this in my bones💔
Home started in the suburbs outside of Atlanta for me – lush, almost, jungle-like trees and woods; foggy mornings with the sun shining through; horse farms interspersed with neighborhoods and strip malls – and has now also been Madison, WI, Boston, MA, and Chicago, IL. Madison was often freezing cold, with lots of late nights and early mornings on the lake with the sun slowly peeking over the horizon. We'd walk around the farmer's market debating what to buy. Boston was homey in a grad-school-poor sort of way – I had no money to access the fancy stuff but I built a community of close friends and we had each other. Chicago is the most expansive of them all, and sometimes I swear I can FEEL the economic power of the city, and like I will never know everything that's happening here. But then there are these moments that feel like little secrets – biking to the lakefront in the summer, the neighborhood block parties and street festivals, jumping in the lake on a Friday morning in the summer, and the way it's whisper-quiet after a deep snow. Each place has felt like home at a specific point in my time living there, when I had friends who were close (geographically and emotionally) and knew enough of the place to really be comfortable there.
My pie chart can also be read as a pie crust— one giant circle around the US. Oklahoma- NM- Southern CA- San Francisco- NYC- Virginia. I suppose I need to move somewhere in Tennessee now to complete my loop! I feel a deep pull of nostalgia for most of the places I've lived, but it's hard to define what home actually is.
anjie
Home has been Mumbai ,New York, Hong Kong & now Kuala Lumpur. I so agree with many of the commentators that home is wherever you have a strong support system & that city for me is the city of my birth -Mumbai -insane, chaotic but my forever home
Maria Anagnostopoulou
Such a lovely text! I felt it deeply in my heart. For me home is the house in Athens where I was born. Then the little student appartment in Salonica (North Greece) where I lived with my first love. And then my apartment in Athens where I lived alone with my son after my divorce. But my true home is the small theatre I created with my own hands together with the love of my life. My love died eight years ago, the theatre closed too and now I live in my apartment in Athens together with my best friend. But when I say the word "home", the little theatre at the centre of old Athens comes before my eyes always.
Lno Minigo or Indian Island is a small rural First Nations community on the East Coast of Canada. My family has lived here on and off for many generations. We tended to be fairly nomadic back in the day so I have family all across the United States and my parents actually met in Connecticut. My Grandfather Peter became hereditary chief when he was in his teens, went off to fight in WWII with the North Shore Regiment then came home, got married and settled back on Indian Island with his wife Laura, my Migitjo. When they moved back to Indian Island full time it was just my grandparents and their kids which included my dad. There were no other families living there full time. Can you imagine the isolation? Over the years it has become a bustling little community full of children and community spirit. I've lived here all my life and my siblings do as well. We're so close that we all pretty much live side by side. I live with my non-native husband Neil and two beautiful daughters. My husband has lived on the reserve so long that we forget that he is not native lol. This will always be my home, with its beautiful beaches, strong northern winds, salty sea air, mayflowers, blueberries, seafood, ice fishing, back roading, boating and, cups of tea with my elders as the children play outside.
Reply to Rose
Such a beautiful vivid description Rose.
YES! my pie chart has Luni, Pisa, Koeln, Milan, Lucca. 5 different versions of me.
When someone asks me where home is, I say Berlin – the city where I was born and raised – without thinking about it. I viscerally feel that I'm home when I touch down at the airport in Berlin and see the orderly German street signs.
I love Berlin and grew up without any particular desire to live anywhere else in the world (despite having two passports from birth, my father is American), but when I was 16 my family moved to the US for my father's work, and I have not stopped moving in the 28 years since then.
Today I use the word "home" liberally when I talk to my children – not only when I talk about Berlin (where they were born too), but when I talk about where we currently live (in Senegal), when talking about visiting their grandparents (in the US and France), or when talking about other places in which they have grown up (in Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo). I tell them we are very lucky that we have many places we can call home.
I've been at "home" (for 6 months or more) in more than 15 countries on five continents. I think one thing that moving often teaches you is to appreciate what makes a place unique. Every neighborhood, city and country has positive as well as negative sides; none are perfect. But I'd like to think that you can generously call anywhere that shapes your life and provides you with a feeling of belonging a home.
Thank you for this lovely post and for the treasure trove of fascinating comments.
Oof, this was a timely post for me to read. I've been living in Switzerland for 13 years and am married to a French man. I myself am half Japanese half British and grew up in both countries (though formative years were in Japan so they feel heavier) with a 3 year stint in Italy as a child. Despite the 13 years and basically all of my adulthood here, I still don't feel at home in Switzerland. My daughter is almost five and to her this is home and the languages and customs are what inform her. I struggle with the idea of her home being different to mine, but the again, which of my two would I offer her? I don't want to live in the UK and my husband is far from keen on returning to France. So Japan it is. Is it? Is it that simple?
How is it that Italy feels more like home to me than Switzerland despite all the years I've invested here?
Is language the be all end all? I've learnt German and French but have failed to master the local dialect and it's like being in front of a revolving door that's inviting you in but going just a tad too fast to be able to step into.
I have no wisdom to share, I'm just pondering in "public".
But I know I will live in Japan again before I die. I miss it with my bones. The UK, not so much, but I am also British through and through.
Reply to Christine
Oh, Christine! The image of the revolving door is so poignant! I have lived most of my life in Switzerland and there are many many things I love. But the dialects are weird to me too. I am perfectly fluent but sometimes have a out-of-body experience hearing myself saying such funny words, making those sounds. I feel a lot more comfortable talk8ng in the two languages I grew up with. They feel like home to me- as if I can be more like my true self. Greetings from Zürich!
For a boring middle class family my family moved a lot. I think I changed schools ten times before I went to University. But home, deep in my heart is a place I actually didn't like much at the time. The quiet ocean, the stillness of the lake… not awesome as a kid. It was also rough. But I made two of the most beautiful friends of my life while we lived there and they taught me so much about happiness and love that my heart always wants to return. We left that place because my mother was really sick and needed to be near a hospital… maybe that's part of the mystery too – that was the place before we became mortal.
Reply to Kirby
"the place before we became mortal"= well said
I love these Cup of Jo questions, which are kind of like journal prompts to me. :) And I love reading the answers!
I grew up moving around a lot, with my parents finally settling in North Carolina when I was 17 (they've since both moved to other states or countries). I met my husband here, attended college here, and have worked hard to build the type of roots and community I felt was lacking from my military brat upbringing. It's not easy building community, which is why I feel like NC will be our permanent home base. My soul, though, feels most connected to my surroundings in two other places, namely the NC Blue Ridge Mountains (where we attended college) and the Berkshires of Western MA, where my maternal side is from and all of that extended family still resides. We make sure to spend lots of time in and expose our kids to both of these places.
I absolutely love the West Coast and lament that I wasn't raised out there and don't have a reason to move out there, because the nature is stunning. But, community and connectedness are more important to me.
I loved this so well written essay. What a joy!
I left my hometown for university when I was 18 and since then I've lived in 5 different places (in 3 different countries). The city I live now has been the same one for 17 years, but due to vicissitudes of life. I never felt the "rightness" to live here as Abigail Rasminsky felt for NY.
I came here for a wonderful job, and I stayed. It's handy: the international airport is 10 minutes from my house, all the concerts and cultural events happen here, my small group of friends from university is here also.
However, I have always felt that I do not belong to a specific place, I feel a foreign even when I'm back in my hometown, I don't feel at home. Just passing by, although I don't know where to. And I'm almost 55 years old.
But it is a good feeling, I'm not complaining.
I think I'll go back to my hometown when I retire, because it's smaller and I can be near my family. But who knows?
I do love this feeling of being a foreigner, to feel at home not being in my hometown.
Wendyloch
A commenter here said that home is in our heads, and I tend to agree. Like many here, I've lived in a number of places, from New York to Mexico to California and beyond. The ones that feel like home, and there are a few, are all places where I made lasting connections, to people, to culture, to geography, to my own sensibilities. For me, home is a jigsaw puzzle, with pieces far flung and near. Some of them may be small or oddly shaped, but they've each helped to form some sense I have of myself, and any picture I have of home would not be complete without them.
Reply to Wendyloch
Military wife here! After nearly 15 years in this lifestyle, we don't have a "home" anymore in the classic sense. We've lived all over the world and we absolutely love our nomadic life. In fact, we are having a hard time deciding where to retire and set up a home-home. For our girls we go with the "I was born here, but I've lived all over." My husband and I don't consider where we grew up as home anymore. We've lived more life away from them then in them now. Our home genuinely is where we end up for the next year or three. ❤️
Reply to Samantha
As a military wife with a young toddler and another on the way your comment made me happy cry. It will be okay, right? We are in a tough chapter of this military life. on year 3 or 4 in Okinawa. It's a tough place to make into a home.
We are 8 years into this military life but only two duty stations. My two daughters will be born in Japan and sometimes I get sad thinking they wont have a "home base". (My husband wants to do 20+). But my husband reminds me, we just have to be their home. My parents have a lake house in Virginia where we will take them every summer- so I'm hoping that fills the void.
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