On Homesickness
I’m a homebody, through and through.
Anyone who knows me well enough to be bothered reading this is probably already well aware of that fact. They’re probably also aware of the fact that my family and I have moved houses, and towns, twice since the summer of 2020.
So I’ve been grappling a lot with a slipping sense of home. This started even before we moved, if I’m honest, for a few reasons. I’ve talked a bit about some of those reasons before, although I rarely feel like I’ve expressed myself thoroughly, or accurately. It’s weird, for instance, to have your house bought (out from under your feet – or at least that’s how it felt) but to keep living there, renting back from the new owner. The house you’ve lived in for over a decade, over half of your life. It’s weird to exist in a space that you and your family have made your own, that you’ve lived in and lived with for so many years, and suddenly have to treat it like it belongs to somebody else. It’s weird to live there in the knowledge that the new owner will eventually ask you to leave so he can knock the whole house down and build some ugly boxy grey modern thing in its place, like he’s already built for himself around the corner – something that looks patently ridiculous in your quiet, suburban-bordering-on-rural neighbourhood full of thirty-year-old bungalows, occupied mostly by retired grandparents, with an empty overgrown field past the dead end that you can trudge through to get to the woods and the wetlands.
(After we moved, my mom received occasional photos of the construction, from the next-door neighbour she got along so well with. My youngest sibling has walked over to have a look while visiting their best friend who lives nearby. I haven’t been able to look at the pictures, though, or even hear much description of what’s there. My home is no more, and this breaks my heart. The house is gone, the gorgeous old trees cut down, the dilapidated swingset destroyed. How am I meant not to be affected by that?)
Last week, after a trip to a small zoo, my family and I stopped in Caledonia for something to eat. We passed a Home Hardware, and for the first time, I realised consciously that every single Home Hardware store looks to me like it’s missing something, because it doesn’t say WEEKS on the front.
If I hear someone say they’re going ‘to the hardware store,’ it’s Weeks of Waterdown that I picture, even now. Home in Waterdown, the store has a very loyal customer base, and it remained strong even when a much larger Rona location opened nearby. It’s just kind of a local fixture – an important business, with a long history in town. And for me – and I’m sure lots of other kids from the area – it’s what Home Hardware looks like. It’s what a hardware store looks like, full stop. A Home Hardware that isn’t Weeks looks incomplete.
Listen: I understand this is a stupid thing to get hung up on. I wish I could claim it’s coming from a ‘support small local business’ point of view, but as much as I do appreciate that attitude… The fact is that I’m just a sentimental piece of shit. But, again, if you know me well enough to read these ramblings, you’ve probably figured that out about me.
It’s not exactly Weeks that I’m sticking on, to be fair. It’s just that that line of thought led me back to my now-indefinite feelings of homesickness.
I’ve been homesick since we left Waterdown – since we were first given the deadline by which we had to be moved out, actually. Maybe since we sold the house in the first place. There was almost a full year between selling and moving, but the knowledge that we would have to move weighed heavily on me.
The thing about that homesickness, though, is that I’m homesick for something that isn’t there. Not just our house, which is literally gone, but for the Waterdown of my childhood, which no longer exists in the way it did when I came to love it. We moved to Waterdown when I was four, and I objected immensely, because I was even worse at coping with change then than I am now. But the town came to be home for me pretty quickly, once I got over my little-kid petulance. My parents liked that it was a small town, a bit on the older side, with trees and character and space to breathe. I grew to love these things, too, although I wouldn’t recognise them exactly as such until I got older.
A few years after we moved there, the town was amalgamated into the larger city of Hamilton. This didn’t have much effect, though, until I was into my teens. I went to middle school and university in Hamilton, and it’s where most of my friends are – I have a great deal of love for Hamilton, but I don’t necessarily love what it did to Waterdown. Developments started popping up and propagating like dandelions in the empty fields around the edges of town, and older areas that weren’t protected by historical interest were being updated mercilessly. The grassy expanses that once surrounded my high school were under development by the time I started attending, and not by the pleasant kind of spread-out neighbourhoods that took up most of the town. Townhouses were packed in tighter than I even knew they could be – in some areas they’re three storeys tall, on top of the garages, because they’re so damn narrow that’s the only way to fit people into them. Big commercial buildings were stacked up in the corners of town, to be filled half by big box stores and otherwise sit half-empty or play host to a rotating cast of small private businesses that couldn’t stay open more than four to six months. Interesting old buildings with decent lots were sold and flattened in the hopes of development for something more lucrative.
By the time we left Waterdown, it had turned into something else. It was busier and newer and shinier than the home I’d loved for so long. A lot of the things I’d always liked about it were fading, if not rubbed away entirely. But I still loved it, because it was home, and for the same reason, I still miss it. Anytime I pass through now, it feels alien and unfamiliar, but it pulls at my heart the same way regardless. It’s a strange mix of emotions.
I know the old adage about how you can’t go home. I think the conventional wisdom is that you’ll change while you’re away, and when you come back, the familiar will no longer look the same as it once did. I understand it better in a narrative context than a real one, because that’s just who I am, I guess: it’s part of the classic hero’s journey. Frodo travels Middle Earth, and his journey changes him – not just the places he goes, but the experiences he has. He goes through so much more than he could ever have imagined, and he’s traumatised, but also he learns how strong he is, sees his friends become heroes, discovers so much about how the world works. And so, when he comes home to the Shire, he finds it too small for him.
The thing is, I don’t think I’ve changed much in the last three years. Actually, I’ve kind of stagnated. I know that to a certain degree, that’s true of most of us, because a global pandemic has limited our opportunities to do… basically anything. I’ve spent this time either at home or at work, and the work hasn’t been exciting. I’ve struggled a lot with writing, which is… strange, because before all this, writing was the one thing I could guarantee when my mental health was bad. A lot of my most prolific writing periods have taken place when I was doing really, really badly in every other way. At this point in my life, writing is almost the only thing that gives me much genuine sense of accomplishment or personal growth, and it’s harder than it’s ever been. There are probably more factors to that than I could even count, but I have to be honest – homesickness, and the other feelings wrapped up in it, has been a major contributor to my psyche absolutely tanking in the last few years.
But if it’s not me that’s changed, then I don’t know how to fix this. When Frodo finds the Shire no longer suits him, he boards a ship to the Undying Lands, to seek out a new home with Bilbo and the elves. That’s not so much of an option for me.
From June 2020 to February 2022, we rented a house in Ingersoll. Since February 2022, we’ve been renting a place in Waterloo. And listen, don’t get me wrong – I’m lucky to be with my family, and to be so close to them. I’m lucky that we’ve found nice houses and been able to make them feel like home, in the sense that they’re definitely where the Myrden family lives. I feel comfortable, writing this in my bedroom right now – the space mostly feels like mine, and it’s colourful and cosy and definitely a mess. It’s a relief to come back here after a crappy shift or a long afternoon of running errands. Relatively recently we had the opportunity to move my Nana into the care facility literally at the other end of our block, and having her a five-minute walk away has been wonderful, and definitely added a little bit to my sense of comfort here.
But this place still feels more like a house I live in than it feels like home. I don’t know where anything is in Waterloo unless it’s somewhere between my house and the grocery store where I work. There is no corner store whose owners know me by name. I cannot walk to a friend’s house or sit under a tree at the park that I’ve known for as long as I can remember. When my coworkers talk about where they went to high school or the pizza joint in their neighbourhood, I don’t have a clue where these places are. My siblings and I have no history here, no friends, no familiarity.
My parents can’t say with any confidence that they’ll ever be in a position to own a home again. My siblings and I can’t say we ever expect to own homes at all, between various health situations and the general State Of The World. And even the places we’ve rented in Ingersoll and Waterloo have been chosen based largely on proximity to work, rather than where we’d like to be.
So if I can’t go home because home (my house) isn’t home, and home (Waterdown) just isn’t the place I love it for being, and I’m just not in a position to find a new place to make feel like home… how am I ever meant to escape the homesickness?
I don’t have answers. The most obvious course is to try to feel more at home where I am, but that’s a lot easier said than done. When you’ve had the rug pulled out from under you, and your assumed future thrown up in the air like a loose deck of cards, as many times as I have in the last several years, it gets hard to trust anything to work out. It’s hard even to make decisions about how I want to move forward in my life, because so little feels reliable in the long term.
I also don’t know how to end this. I had so many thoughts when I started writing, but I don’t know what my conclusion is. I’d love to sign off with something hopeful and optimistic, about how things are looking up, or about having new goals to aim for. I’ve got nothing, though. My folks are trying to help me figure out some kind of plan to pull myself together and aim for better work, so I can (ideally) be both less miserable and less broke. I’m trying really, really hard to connect with people, even though it’s ridiculously hard to make new friends at 28 without the scaffolding of school to help. In theory, I figure if I had a decent job and even a few friends in the area, that could do me a lot of good. I’d at least be moving in the right direction. If I can work out how to feel more comfortable where I am in just one or two small ways, it’ll make it a little bit less daunting to tackle bigger obstacles.
It feels like a lot of ifs, though.
I don’t know what, if anything, is going to work. I don’t know if any of the possibilities I’m looking at are actually going to be the right choice. I don’t know if I’m going to figure anything out anytime soon. But I do know that things aren’t sustainable as they are.
So I guess, for now, all I can do is hold close the little scraps of home I do have, and keep moving forward.
