The realtor swept his arm with a big motion. “And this is where the kitchen will be.” He paused for effect, raising his eyebrows as if he wanted me to gush over the prospect. When I did nothing, he cleared his throat. “Da, da, well, it is very good! Važi. Sign now and one month, you move in.” He thrust a clipboard back at me for the third time.
I bit my lip to keep from laughing. I at least had to commend him for his persistence. “No, I don’t think this will be the right home for us.” I was trying to be kind. My husband and children had already abandoned the tour and were wandering around on their own.
“No? Not yet? Perhaps we need to see the—what’s the word?” His brow furrowed as he thought. “Sleeping room?”
I don’t know what he thought he could show me at that point that might change my mind. The entire apartment was still just studs and rebar. We were walking through a construction zone when we needed an actual place to live.
We had arrived in Skopje, North Macedonia, just a week earlier. After a few nights in a hotel, we moved to a tiny apartment our company was letting us use while we looked for a place to rent. We were free to start a lease as soon as we wanted to, if only we could find a place.
We had already seen several apartments. There was the fourth-floor apartment in the building that had no lights in the corridors or elevator. There was the sixth-floor apartment that had lights but no elevator. Then there was the apartment that had both lights and a working elevator (with an accordion-style door you closed yourself) but reeked of cigarette smoke. Now we were looking at a place that had lights (in the building but not in the actual apartment) and an elevator, but nothing else. No interior walls, no floors, no countertops, no bathrooms.
I followed the realtor to the bedroom—or at least where he said the bedroom would be—and forced a smile. My toddler son had come to me and was tugging on the bottom of my shirt with one hand and was sucking on his fingers on the other hand. He had been sucking on his fingers more since the move. I started to pick him up but was distracted by the realtor talking again.
“See? Very nice. In Macedonian we say ubavo.” He stepped up to the wall and held his hands out in front of him. “The bed. Right here. One month!”
“Yes, but we need a place to move in now—”
He cut me off before I could finish. “Važi, great. Sign. One month, you move in.”
I rubbed my eyes and looked across the apartment to my husband and little girl. Across the way, my husband grinned at me. My oldest tugged again on my shirt.
“Do you have any other places to show us?” I asked.
“No, no, no. This one is good. One month!” He reached his left hand out to tickle my son’s belly as he tried to hand me the clipboard again. My son and I both moved away from him.
“See? He likes it! Bravo!”
I felt another tug on my shirt. “Did you need something?” I asked as I picked my son up and settled him on my hip.
“Mommy, where’s the home?”
Over the first nine years of my son’s life, we had mail delivered to twelve different addresses in four different cities in two states and two countries. The only constant was our family. Children are resilient, however, and that constant of mommy and daddy and then little sisters added to the family was enough for him. I, however, struggled.
Growing up as the child of divorced parents, home was convoluted for me. Is home where your mom is? Or where your dad is? Do you have two homes? Or perhaps it’s just wherever you are at that moment.
As a young girl, I remember looking at wedding pictures hanging on the walls of a friend’s home. Around the house, they had pictures of the family as they added new children and as they all got older. We, too, had pictures hanging on our walls growing up, but it was different. Years were missing. People were missing.
When I moved away to college, I added a new layer of ambiguity. For nine months of the year, I was at college. Was home where I spent the majority of the year in a dorm or where I grew up?
After college was over, I added new complexities. I got married and moved my stuff to a new state with my husband, but we rented a small student apartment that would never be ours (nor that we wanted to be ours. The bats in the attic had already claimed ownership, and I was happy to return it to them). Then we rented another apartment. Then we moved overseas.
When you’re living as an expatriate, home gets really complicated. Is home your native country or the place where you’re currently living?
We continued in this state of at-home-but-not-really for the first ten years of our marriage, living somewhere temporarily, moving around a lot and never knowing where we belonged. Moving back to the States a few years later, I was disappointed that I didn’t feel at home in the one place I thought I should. Would I ever belong again?
As we moved around, I might have said that home is a feeling. Or rather, you know you’re at home because of a feeling. I think I’d argue with myself now after finally having been settled in one place for over a decade.
The feelings of home don’t come first. If you wait for the feelings, you may never settle into the type of relationship with a place that requires something of you. Before those feelings can come, you must first have commitment and then ownership. I don’t mean the legal ownership that comes with signing a lot of papers in front of a lawyer. I mean actually choosing to invest yourself into a place in a way that would cost you something if someone were to damage your home or even insult it.
After three months away, our oldest returned home for the holidays. In preparation for his arrival, his little sister left signs all over the house to welcome him. One sign, hanging on his bed, said, “Your home!” Homophones are tricky, especially those that use a pesky apostrophe as part of the spelling. Her intended announcement was what we were all eagerly waiting for—our son, their brother, to finally be home after a fall semester away. But her mistake is also a beautiful declaration: This is still your home! You are wanted here and missed terribly when you’re gone! Without you here, it isn’t quite right. You belong to this home, and this home belongs to you.
What made it so? Why is this home his and not that home?
The simplest answer is the people. Our son’s family—his mom, dad, three little sisters, and baby brother—is in this house. But I’m convinced it’s more than that.
When we bought our home twelve years ago, I thought we were buying a commodity. We would sign a ridiculous amount of papers and pay everything we had so we would have a house where we could stay without the confines of a lease. I also wanted to finally pick out colors to paint a few walls (or, let’s be honest, have my husband paint a few walls), something you can’t do when you’re renting. I also thought about the financial security it could bring us. We had spent so many years renting and had nothing to show for all the money we had spent.
Now, after all this time, and especially after having moved so much before we settled here, I think a house is more than a commodity. It might be more accurately called an organism that is changing and growing old with each passing day, as people do real, messy life within its walls. The house is now etched with years of stories of our lives. That scratch in the floor is where a big sister pushed baby brother in his high chair without wheels all the way to the bathroom so that they could wait for me to finish showering. The notch in the door jamb—that’s from an unfortunate wayward hammer when children were trying to make repairs to a fort. The hole in the wall? Don’t ask. I was never told who caused it, but I have my suspicions.
It’s hard to separate the memories of my kids’ childhoods from our house. The meals and math lessons we’ve shared at the same dining room table. The children sleeping in pillow-and-blanket forts in the living room on a winter night because they were excited to wake to a fresh snow. The campouts in our backyard with friends. The family workouts and soccer games in the front yard. The races around the cul-de-sac.
In twelve years, this place has changed a lot. My husband is proud of the various trees, bushes, and plants he’s put in our yard. He remembers when he planted them and why they were picked. Each one of them has changed the view, adding a little more beauty to our modest property. We’ve also done various renovations and repairs that changed our home. Garage and sliding doors have been replaced. We have changed out flooring and toilets. Lots and lots of walls have been painted and repainted. Downstairs, we changed the layout by adding a wall and a closet and closing off two connected rooms.
Some of these changes were repairs—no one wants to stress about a garage door falling on one of the children—but many of them tell the story of our family growing up. A bedroom went from pale pink to purple when one sister moved downstairs and another moved in. The wall was added because our family was growing and we needed another bedroom. Those rose bushes were each picked out by my children for my Mother’s Day presents. The Japanese maple was gifted to us by our dear neighbor before he died.
I don’t know at what point this particular house became ours. Certainly, one might argue there’s a specific moment when this house became ours—perhaps the moment we promised thirty years of payments to a bank or maybe when such payments are finally paid off. But I think it became ours little by little. Mess after mess, laughter around the table, hurts and pains, wronging and forgiving, newly-thought-of games, shared meals, books read while snuggling on the couch. The very act of living here has made this house ours. And while big brother was gone for three months, the years of making this house his are plentiful enough that a semester away at school won’t undo that. His sister might have written, “You’re home because this is your home. And this is your home because you’re home.”
“Ah! He likes it! Super!” The realtor bent over to set the clipboard on the ground. “Come here, boy. I show you your—” he paused again, forgetting the word momentarily. He began to speak Macedonian to himself as he searched for the English words. “Spalna soba. Da, da. Room for sleeping,” he muttered. When my son didn’t respond, the man took three steps on the dusty sub-flooring. “This! This is your sleeping room!”
My son blinked at the realtor and then reached up to me to be held. “Why don’t I have any walls?”
“Yes! Lots of walls! You’ll have walls, walls, walls! Ubavo walls!”
My husband laughed from the other side of the would-be apartment. He was near a hole in the exterior wall covered by plastic where a window would someday go.
“You’re not helping!” I whispered to him, hoping the realtor would not hear.
The realtor continued to tell us how great it would be in just one month. I made my way to the exit, my family following, the realtor still trying to get us to sign the lease.
When we finally stepped out of the apartment building, I looked around, unable to focus on what the realtor was saying in his current pitch. Everything around me looked different from the States. Nothing looked like home.
Several concrete buildings, ten to fifteen stories high and covered in graffiti, were in front of me. To the left, dumpsters overflowing with trash lined the parking lot. As we walked past them, I pulled my son closer to me because of the mangy stray dogs that lay among the trash. To our right, a Roma man was digging through the dumpsters, tossing any plastic bottles he found onto his wagon. My son tried to pet the man’s skinny horse, but I pulled him away.
The realtor was still talking. “One month! This will be your home!”
Image via Pexels.
