My Journey to Find Home

Posted on October 12, 2018 by Andrea Lawson Jaramillo, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

“When you look into my eyes, and you see the crazy gypsy in my soul, it always comes as a surprise when I feel my withered roots begin to grow, well I never had a place that I could call my very own.
That’s all right, my love, ‘cause you’re my home”.

Billy Joel from the song “You’re My Home”
___

When our oldest turned seven she came home from school and asked me to help her with a question she was struggling with. In an arrogant know-it-all-adult-fashion I agreed assuming I would have answers for her. She proceeded to say: "When people ask me where I am from, I respond I was born in NY…. But I have noticed that other people answer by saying: I am Colombian or I am American. Mamá, what am I? …….

She caught me completely off guard and her questions stirred things up for me. I resorted to the truth: “That’s a very difficult question. I still don’t know how to answer it myself. Depending on how much I feel like talking I will tell people where I was born, where my parents are from, where I have lived, or how I feel. When you don’t feel like talking much, your answer is perfect and is true. You were born in NY.”

I knew my response was a way to help her get by when confronted with the question but I also realized I was not really helping her find her own answer. She inspired me to embrace the question myself.

As many other Third Culture Kids (TCKs) who grew up a bit all over the world, the questions I hated the most were: Where are you from? What do you call home? Until that conversation with my daughter I realized that for the last 40 years I had been secretly holding onto the illusion that I would finally find a place where I belonged and be able to call it home. I had been hopping to find a particular place so that I could answer the questions truthfully and unequivocally.

However, thanks to my daughter, I began to come to terms with the fact that if I hadn’t found a place to call home after living in six countries and traveled to more than 40 I might never find one. Could it be that I had been approaching the issue the wrong way? What would it feel like if I could stop asking myself every time I travel: Is there where I truly belong? Could I call this home? Do I look and behave like a local? Do I feel a special connection passed on to me from another life, or ancestor that helps me feel like I fit in?

It was time to approach the question differently. I decided to begin by exploring the word that had troubled me over the years: “home”. I started by listing to my assumptions regarding the word. I soon realized I had always taken for granted that “home” had to be located in particular place and remain permanent. I assumed that in order to call a place home, others had to believe and accept it was mine. Without acknowledging it I was assuming I needed strangers to validate my home some how.

Fully aware of my assumptions, I decided to question them. Does home actually have to be fixed? Does it have to exist in just one location? Do I need to fulfill certain requirements like place of birth, language, passport, last name, ethnicity to be allowed to call it home, or can I self declare it? To my surprise, I was on to something.

After a bit of research I quickly discovered that there are definitions of the word “home” that do not call for a unique, fixed location. In fact, according to the Webster Dictionary, one of its meanings is: “The social unit formed by a family living together”. That definition gave me hope.

When I delved deeper and began looking for the etymology of “home”, I came across a blog post by Anatoly Liberman, an etymology expert. He pointed out that the word “home” has changed over time. In today’s world, we value privacy and therefore have associated home with a physical private space where we are with our immediate family. Centuries ago, we lived more in community, and home was the place open to our community members with whom we felt at ease. If I had lived five hundred years ago, I probably wouldn’t have had such a tough time understanding where home was. The answer would have been more straightforward. It would have been where my community was, whether it was under a roof, on the road, or in a new country. Home would not have had to be attached to specific coordinates in the world or linked to my blood relatives.

It took my seven-year-old daughters question to finally see I had found my home more than a decade before and had taken it with me to live in three countries without realizing it. I was so busy looking for a “place” to call home with my husband and kids; I hadn’t realized I was traveling with my home.

I have since then embraced the idea that my home is not confined to a space or geography. It has no roof or windows. It is created by connections. It is the place where I act, behave, think, and respond like my true “me”, not the one that performs for others and behaves by the socially accepted norms. Home are the people who make me feel more “me” than I have ever felt before. Home is being with my husband, the first person with which I truly felt like myself. He accepts and loves the version of me that is me, not one that should be more “XYZ”, or could be less “ABC”. Home is being with my girls who see and appreciate the true me without make up and jewelry and obtain the unfiltered non-compliant version of me. I now realize I will never find a specific geographic place in the world that can make me feel the way he, and my girls do. Just as Billy Joel points out in his song “You Are My Home”, my home are my loved ones, the ones I bring with me and the ones spread across the world who know the true me.

Now I embrace every opportunity I have to talk with my girls about identity, sense of belonging, fitting in, home. I don’t want them to hold onto a definition of home that works for others. They need to find the one that works for them and hopefully spare them of the long empty disappointing quest of longing to fit in only to come to realize it was in front of them all along.

Although having found my home takes an immense weight off my shoulder, I am still left with the dilemma of how to answer the question during small talk. I will continue to follow my own advice, and share as much of my story as I feel like sharing and knowing that only a few will get the full and honest answer.