Homecoming
This is a long read. But an important one.
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Over the course of my life I have lived in five US states, eleven different cities, and held nineteen unique addresses. Up until this moment I didn’t have a home town. I’ve never really even had a home. I’ve had places I’ve lived at for a few years at the most.
When people ask me where I’m from, I usually say, “Well, most recently…” or I list the various places I’ve hailed from over the years. And they typically reply with, “Ah, military family.” As if that’s the only explanation for a nomadic life. But no, that’s not the answer.
The reality is, I grew up in a low-income family that struggled to keep above the poverty line. My childhood was spent being ousted from one place and rushed into another as my parents got laid off, downsized, fired, relocated, divorced, filed for bankruptcy, and career-hopped to survive. I went to three different junior high schools, if you can imagine.
Income instability creates income gaps, and those were naturally followed by missing rent, angry landlords, and eviction notices. As a family we became exceedingly proficient at packing moving, and unpacking. And each time we knew it was just “the next house.” Never a forever home. Not like the ones you see on television, which always felt like fantasy.
You know the ones where the adult daughter comes home with her new boyfriend to meet the parents and she shows him around their house and all the memories of growing up there, including her childhood bedroom which has been lovingly preserved to showcase her journey from toddler to college Freshman like an exhibit in the museum of Average American Family. What is that sense of constancy even like? It will forever remain a mystery to me.
My parents did manage to purchase exactly one home together that we all hoped would be The One and Final Forever Home. We lost it just a few years after when they both lost their jobs due to the company going under and we missed too many mortgage payments in a row. That kind of setback puts immense stress on a marriage and theirs already had multiple hairline fractures.
Divorce followed, and my bother and I spent a year with our single mother learning all new levels of financial hardship. How do you explain to your boss that you couldn’t get to work today because your car was repossessed because you couldn’t afford the payments because childcare was prohibitively expensive on a secretary’s meager salary?
Then if you can’t get to work, you can’t get paid. And if you can’t get paid, you’ll be at risk to lose your job (again) and so you sell everything that’s not nailed down, survive on food stamps, and sleep with two layers of clothes on under every blanket in the house because the heat is turned off due to a past due electric bill.
But I’m not writing this to generate sympathy.
I’m sharing this to provide context and illuminate why the goal of homeownership for me has been such a strong, incessant desire. If you’ve spent your entire existence bouncing from one place to another with no sense of home, you develop an intense longing for it. You yearn for a place that’s yours, where you can put down roots and just…stay there. You crave stability and security. That’s what a home represents to me.
A home that I have finally achieved.
It has been a long, long journey to get here. I have cried so many times realizing how far I’ve had to go to get to this very moment. How impossible it felt and how many times I was set back to zero and had to start all over again from scratch.
I overcame not just the childhood struggles described above, but adult ones as well. I’ve surmounted college debt, income gaps of my own, credit card debt accumulated from paying bills and buying groceries during those gaps, working multiple jobs, evictions, depression, medical bills, nightmarish roommates, a divorce of my own that left me financially gutted, a ruined credit score, and shitty jobs that grossly underpaid me.
Can I just say that it is insanely hard to try and extinguish the raging envy you feel for your friends when they go jaunting off to Barbados or Madrid for two weeks while you’re on your 19th backyard staycation? Or summoning a fake smile at those friends whose parents gifted them the downpayment for a home and co-signed their mortgage?
I have mastered the art of shoving all that down and reminding myself one day that I’ll get there too. “I don’t know when that day will be, but I WILL get there. And it will be on my own steam!” But that only works for so long and then the rest of the time you simply have to drown out the voices with really loud heavy metal and angry punk rock until you can’t think anymore.
I would love to tell you that keeping your head high during all of this is an empowering experience, but it is not. It fucking sucks.
There was absolutely crying, raging, and despairing at the impossibility of it all. There was a tiny part of me that wanted to scream at people who had had life gifted to them on silver platters and proceeded to jump on social media to gush about their “accomplishments.”
There were times when I felt hopeless because it takes so much longer to save up cash when you’re scraping by paycheck to paycheck on the bare minimum and the savings you worked to build up gets depleted because you can’t afford to save for a house and have an emergency fund at the same time. And emergencies happen.
But I got there, in the end. I finally did it.
I got here.
Little by little by little.
August 1st, 2019, I stood on the front porch of a house with a key in my hand and felt my whole life extending behind me. I felt every moment that led up to this. Every dollar saved, luxury denied, vacation forgone, restaurant bypassed, breakfast skipped. I also felt the triumphs, over every overdraft fee, eviction notice, pawn ticket, past due notice, food stamp, days spent without a utility service, boots on car tires, and clothes worn thin.
I also felt the release of anxiety about home shopping, open houses, offer letters, bids, mortgage applications, paperwork, bank statements, money, scrutiny, repaired credit scores. The long, tense wait for a “clear to close,” which happened just two days before the closing date.
This is mine. This is my home. I worked for this. And it’s mine.
DEAR GOD I FUCKING EARNED THIS!!!!!
All my life, working towards this. So hard. And now it’s mine. It’s real. I actually have a home. In so many more ways than just an address or place to stay. It has finally happened and everything has been absolutely worth it.
I put my key into the lock and I stepped through the door to my home.
My home.
I will never get tired of that phrase.
That day I cried. I yelled into the empty house. I shouted. I hugged Mike, who has been on a part of this journey with me (arguably the most important part) and is also realizing his own dreams in this house, albeit in a totally different way. I would not have made it here without him. He has been integral to this dream and we would not be here without the other.
Together we walked through the rooms and just let ourselves feel 999 emotions from joy to relief to disbelief to other things there aren’t words for. We drank the bottle of champagne left for us by the sellers and jumped into the swimming pool that was now our pool which is about as surreal as it gets.
And we were home. At long last.
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Next time I will write about the house itself. How Mike and I spent a year looking for it. How we found it, finally. How we got it (magic, I think) and bought it (35,000 feet in the air). And how much we absolutely love it. But for now, I am just taking the time to reflect and to be thankful for all that has transpired for me to arrive at this very special place, with a very special person, where we will now build the life we’ve always dreamed of.
