Home

I went to one of my versions of Home this past week.

For the first time in seventeen years I felt ready to go back to a place that simultaneously built and broke me over the course of a decade. A place that haunted me long after I had left. I thought about all the times as a child I let it be known that no, in fact, I was not from Minnesota. I wasn’t born there, but the fact is that I spent (almost) every other school year from sixth grade until I graduated high school. There was a year-ish long stint in Valley City, ND after my mother had fallen in love for what felt like the hundredth time, even becoming engaged but never marrying that man. He was kind, he was in recovery, and he was never prepared for the hurricane that was my mother. I think of him sometimes and how he chose a human name for the dog we got, Julie, and how I hated that name.

By the time I had graduated high school I had attended fourteen schools total. While I always considered Denver to be my Home, I have found myself searching into the grey for what that really means. But for today, one of them admittedly is Fergus Falls, MN. A small town almost three hours from the Twin Cities, and hour from Fargo, ND, and in all the ways I thought we were so different from one another, I’ve come to realize the imprint that town has left on my body.

The moment we edged towards town, Anaya asleep in the passenger seat, and I tired and grouchy at the almost-two hour long detour we (accidently) took, the familiarity of it smacked me and it was like I had never left. I knew where to turn, ignoring the GPS and its instructions and went the way I knew. I was surprised at just how much it hadn’t changed in almost 20 years. The public library had been remodeled, and from the looks of things, expanded. The vast majority of the houses a stamp in a time capsule, untouched. There is a house that still has the faux deer in the garden that have been there since I was a child, weather worn.

I felt myself hum, unable to place whether it was excitement or fear or anxiety. Understanding now that it was all of those things, including comfort, and too many memories that flooded my brain- like a movie I was watching on fast-forward. I got Anaya settled inside of our Airbnb, a small apartment on main street above the furniture store that has been there since the beginning of time, simultaneously nursing his migraine and the tenderest parts of my heart. I had plans to bring him back some provisions before touring the town on my own and finding a place for dinner, but once I passed the first house my mother and I had lived in together by ourselves, I parked down the street towards the dead end, attempting to keep my strangeness and strange car from outing me as an actual stranger lurking at dusk, and let myself weep, both shocked and not at how quickly it washed over me- the place, the history, the longing, for both my mother and for home. Grateful to not have to clean mascara from my cheeks, I abandoned the rest of my tour as it had quickly turned dark, and headed towards the brewery that had opened in town long after I had left, sitting in the parking lot paralytic with fear. Fear that someone might recognize me, or smell the sadness that clung to my sweater. I decided against it, and headed back towards my home du jour, back to Anaya, and ate stale popcorn, distracting myself until I knew I needed to go to bed.

Once I dragged my body to the ancient Tempur-Pedic (those things are weird?!), Anaya fast asleep for several hours, I laid there and let myself float through the endless snapshots that swam across my eyelids. The schools, the kids, the loneliness. The beauty of it all, too. I had almost forgotten how beautiful that part of the country is in the fall, even being two weeks too late to bear witness to a true Midwestern autumn. I saw the long country roads, the fields I looked out on during bus rides, how I fantasized about a boy named Kyle taking me into the field and kissing me. The rope swing at the swimming hole, the endless bike rides, the innocence I reclaimed as we ran wild into the woods, across bridges, into lakes. The boys and girls I crushed on. The cold that sticks to your hair. The unspeakable bond I shared with my mother that would eventually rupture. The fear. The tears. The isolation.

My childhood was a dance of unrequited normalcy, pockmarked with things that should never have to be normalized. There were days of ice creams and trips to the movie theater. There were voice lessons, and there were the black spots. The men, the drugs, the care-taking of an adult that was childlike in their own ways. What I’m trying to say, is that I let myself feel, and remember it all.

I was known for my memory as a child. As if it were a party trick, my mother and aunt and cousins would ask me a question- what someone was wearing, when something had occurred, my earliest memories, and clap and eclaim as if they were witnessing a sideshow act. I have since lost a lot of that ability. Partly due to aging, my late-in-life ADHD diagnosis, and the trauma of it all. I have vivid memories of running the length of the chain link fence outside of Adams Elementary but I have zero recollection of who my teacher was or even what my classroom looked like. In fact, the entirety of third and fourth grade, save a handful of snapshots of specific playgrounds, are a mystery to me. In all of the ways I very much have a photographic memory, a sharp one even, there is so much I don’t remember and despite understanding why, I still wish I did.

But there I was, in a bed with my partner, my home, in an apartment in a place that I understand now large parts of me still lived, allowing myself to feel and replay it all. All of the good and all of the bad, like a journal being read out loud to me. It was hard and it was healing, and as I watched Anaya sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the homes I have had and what home actually means to me. What I have discovered is that I’m not sure home is a destination because I have had many. It’s not a place so much as it is a feeling. Denver doesn’t feel more like home than any other place I’ve lived simply because I was born here. Home is anywhere with Anaya and the kids. It’s wherever I lay down when I’m away from our actual home. It’s Minnesota and Seattle and Houston and Colorado. The mountains and the sea and small towns that feel like they never quite forgot about me the same way I never forgot about them.

xxx

I stopped putting things on my walls as some point as a child. I knew that our stay would inevitably be short and it seemed silly to make a place a home despite my mother always attempting in her own right with decorating and unpacking while most of my boxes stayed piled in a corner in any room in any place, like foreshadowing. I stayed this way long after I moved from Minnesota. Living out of duffel bags, and even after I moved into apartments of my own, never quite taking the time to make it my home. It wasn’t until I was pregnant with Scarlett that I allowed myself to truly settle into the idea of what feelslike, and what makes a home. I knew I wanted to do it for her, creating something that resembled home, but it is only this year that I have really embraced the sheer allowance of sinking into home is right here. There is artwork, family photos, the kid’s artwork, plastered on every wall, making it known to us and visitors alike that THIS is our home.

I very much like it this way.

xxx

I went there to let myself feel it all, see family, take in places I tried so hard to forget, and remember the good. It was the first time in a long time I have been able to soak in my mother despite everything and remember the way we laughed and loved each other. It has prompted me to potentially take my current manuscript in a different direction, and that is another story for another day.

I hope you feel at home, wherever you are and whatever that means to you.

Biggest love,

AT

Currently Reading: I’m still on Practical Magic (is it…slower than I hoped?) and also listening to The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Currently Listening To: Moody Instrumentals on Spotify. I can’t listen to music with words when I read or write, can you imagine?

Currently Cooking: I think I’ll make some chicken meatballs with fresh sage and thyme, bake them, and serve them with parmesan gemelli with greens tonight.

Recently Published: An essay for Insider on destigmatizing the word “fat” as a fat parent you can read here.

Also published by Insider is an essay about how food was a bridge to my relationship with my father here. It is important to note that some of the editing done (much to my dismay) was done in a way that may be confusing for people that know me as the timeline has been, well, fucked.

As always, thank you for supporting my work. If you aren’t a paid subscriber and find value in these newsletters, it would mean a tremendous amount should you chose to become a paid subscriber. If that is unavailable to you, sharing essays I write or my Substack publication itself is also wildy helpful and very much appreciated.