Home

This weeks challenge from my journaling group at sb.com is to journal about "home".  What home means to me...so here goes.

As a child we moved around a lot, before we moved to Alberta when I was nine I can't remember the number of houses we lived in but I can only actually remember living in one place.  I know we lived with my Aunt and my Grandmother and I do remember their houses but I don't remember living there.  After we moved to Alberta we lived in another six other houses, and this was just as a child not counting the numerous places I have lived as an adult...so to me home is not the house.  To me a house is the four walls protecting you from the elements and it can be anywhere...

To some people home is the place you grew up, that place that holds all your childhood memories.  Well for me when I was a child growing up in Alberta I couldn't wait to get back "home" to Ontario...then as an adult I moved to Nova Scotia and I couldn't wait to get back "home" to Alberta.  When I moved back to the town I grew up in I didn't feel like I was home.  I had moved back after a divorce without my children so I felt a huge part of me was missing.  Plus the fact that the majority of the people I knew when I lived there as a child were gone, or those that were still there had lives that didn't include me.  So although I was back "home" I didn't feel at home at all.  Although in the bottom of my heart the town I lived in from 9 to 19 will always be my hometown it is not my home.

Over my life I have been in many different homes...ones in which the residents kept the place clean enough to eat off the floor, ones where every thing in the house was a priceless treasure that you were afraid to let go of your children in there for fear something would be broken.  Or on the opposite side where there is clutter everywhere and there is no place to sit down and you don't want to let go of your children for fear of what they might get into.  Growing up our house was somewhere in the middle, it was never spotless you could tell children lived there and there were priceless treasures all over the house...but not because of the cost but because a child made it.  Nothing in our house was expensive we made do with what we could afford and it was still home.

To a lot of people "home" is the place their parents have lived in since they were children...since I moved around a lot I don't have that kind of childhood home but every home my father lived in he tried to make it his own.  He tinkered every day at changing things to make my mother feel more at home, and this helped to make every home we lived in more like "home".  My father passed away six years ago and the home that he was living in felt like home because it had signs of him and his handiwork everywhere...since his passing my brother has changed the home a lot and most of the things he changed were things that my father said he was going to change but hadn't the time to get them done...but in making these changes my brother has removed my father from the house making it his home and removes the feelings of "home" for the rest of us.

So I have told you what is not really home to me I guess I should get to the point and tell you what is home.  Having moved around so much and never really making roots to have a "home" I have established that where ever you are with your family is home...right now my husband and I just bought our first house...it is a beautiful house, large with lots of space for our precious treasures but it is no more a home than the military housing we were living in last year.  The only difference is the location and the location doesn't make it home.  Waking up every morning to the sounds of your children getting breakfast, and going to sleep each night exhausted after chasing after the kids all day...that is what makes it home.  Sitting in the living room watching a favourite kid movie for the umpteenth time and watching your child kill themselves laughing at a joke they have heard a million times...that is what makes it home.  Sitting watching the clock waiting for 3:50, 3:55, 4:10 knowing that your husband and children will walk in the door...that is what makes it home.  Sitting down at the dinner table every night with the whole family talking about the day, fighting with the kids to get them to eat all the supper, threatening no dessert if they don't sit down and eat...that is what makes it home.  

The bottom line is a family is what makes it a home, whether your family is just you and your significant other, or if you still live with your parents.  If you have one child or six, or maybe just fury children.  It doesn't matter where you live in a house, an apartment, a condo or a cardboard box.  It doesn't matter if you live in the city, a town, village or out in the country.  All that matters is that the building you live in is full of love because that is what makes it a home.