Note: I apologize for the long absence! While Rio was on summer vacation I had very few moments alone. He’s back to school and I’m back to writing ;-) The piece you are about to read is not about Zephyr’s cancer however what I explore happened in part because of it, so it felt appropriate to include it here.
You have this recurring dream about going to your own house and trying to open the door but it’s locked. You look inside the windows and everything is different - the furniture, the carpet - even the walls are in the wrong places. There are strangers inside and they will not let you in. You circle the house trying windows and doors, but everything is locked. All the trees and plants have been cut down - the pines that you climbed 40 feet into the sky, the rosebush that had the perfect buds to string into summer crowns, the apricot tree that filled your greedy belly with fruit. Every living thing that might remember you is gone.
All you want is to go through the door. To go inside and feel safe, like you belong, like you used to feel as a child - like something was truly yours.
You never feel that way any more.
And the dream is not a dream.
I have not been home to California in more than 3.5 years.
I used to go back every six to twelve months. I never imagined it could be any other way.
But I also never imagined a pandemic would change travel for years, nor did I imagine I’d then have a baby with cancer whose treatment would keep me bound within a small radius of his hospital, so far from so many of the people I love.
And most of what I did imagine was wrong.
When I was a teenager I imagined it like this - all my friends and family intermittently gathering in my childhood home forever, like we always had done before. I thought we’d have parties that would go on all night long like they always used to do because we never wanted our time together to end.
I thought I could fly like a kite, but that something would always be holding on to me, pulling me back. I imagined growing up, traveling, living here and there around the world, maybe having a family, but always returning.
I imagined my future children swimming in the pool I swam in as a girl, my Mom there watching them splash and laugh. She would be crocheting in a rocking chair, while I was swinging in the hammock beside her. I imagined the children climbing the trees I had climbed, scaring my mother like I did so often. Probably scaring me too, the appropriate karmic retribution.
I imagined my childhood home would always be ours - a touchstone, a centerpoint around which I could circle. I believed all the old parts of my life could stay rooted there, and I could visit them, tend to them, and keep them alive although I spent most of my days elsewhere.
I never imagined my mother would make so many horrible personal and financial choices and lose that family home. I never imagined she would die well before she could even meet her grandchildren. I never imagined I might go nearly four years without setting foot on Californian soil. Without going home.
I am going back to California. I know I should be excited.
I am excited.
I also feel tension, trepidation.
What is it I am afraid of?
Am I afraid of the homesickness you feel when you go to the place you are from, but it no longer feels like home? Am I afraid of feeling like a foreigner, no longer Californian enough?
Or am I afraid of getting there and remembering just how Californian I am, making me wonder why I chose to set up my life somewhere else, leaving me filled with longing for the many lives I did not choose and regrets about the one I did?
Am I afraid of removing the miles between me and my loved ones, but then discovering there is still distance between us? Am I afraid of longing for a closeness that I hold in memory, but cannot find my way back to when we are face to face?
Am I afraid of seeing how much people have changed? Or coming to terms with how much I myself have changed? Will I like what I see?
At what point did my mother start to hollow out, becoming a shell of her former self, a nest of fear, sorrow and reactivity? When did our home start to change from a place full of life to a place marked by ghosts and decay? At what point did I admit to myself that everything was dying?
My mother burned many bridges but, in the end, it’s possible things fell apart because she could not move forward. She wanted our life to stay the same forever, and she taught me to want the same and to fear what would happen to her, to us all, should they ever change.
So was I partially to blame?
We did not harvest, nor till the soil, we did not prune nor plant afresh, we just held on to the memories of how it was, and it died all around us.
My mother was so unwilling to believe in a future without that house that she kept on paying the mortgage, dwindling her savings to nothing. She still believed in magic. In fairy godmothers. In someone swooping in to save her. By the time the bank threatened to claim the house, she had almost nothing left.
Through tears, she asked me why I’d not done more to save it, to save her.
We had a month to pack.
The day I drove away from my home for the last time I put the music on my phone on random. A Lisa Hannigan song came on that I loved. I’d never really listened to the words, but the feeling of the music exactly mirrored the feeling in my heart as I drove farther and farther away.
Later I found out it was called “Home” and sobbed…
"Home so far from home,
So far to go
And we've only just begun
And oh, every lie we told
Is written in stone
Every lie we wrote in our bones
And hold on, there's nothing to pack
We know we're not coming back
And Oh, every promise that we broke
Is sewn to our clothes
Now we are pinned to the wind I suppose
And oh, every fallen flake of snow
It has to give in
Oh but we spin and we spin and we spin
And hold on, there's nothing to pack
Lay your heart out, we're not coming back
We're not coming back"
“Houses have no loyalty. We can live in a place ten years and within a fortnight of moving out it is as if we have never been there. It may still bear the scars of our occupancy, of our botched attempts at DIY, but it vacates itself of our memory as soon as the new people move their stuff in. We want houses to reciprocate our feelings of loss but, like the rectangle of unfaded paint where a favourite mirror once hung, they give us nothing to reflect upon. Often in films someone goes to a house where he once spent happier times and, slowly, the screen is filled with laughing. This convention works so powerfully precisely because, in life, it is not like that. It testifies to the strength of our longing: we want houses to be haunted. They never are.” - Geoff Dyer - Out of Sheer Rage
I like to imagine that my house held the history of us, that we left our thoughts, feelings and experiences all over it day after day like snails. I like wondering what it understood better than I ever could about me and my family, and about human beings in general. It had seen a lot.
Just before I left my house forever, I put my arms on either side of the doorframe of my bedroom wall and we embraced. I thought I could feel its sorrow. I felt held momentarily and then released.
A year after the foreclosure I went back to our street and stood in front of what was once my house. The new owners were remodeling and the house had been stripped down to its skeleton. I was hit by grief, wondering if it even counted as my house anymore if the walls that had held us were gone. And if some part of us had been there held in those walls, in the paint, plaster and timber itself, did that mean there were ghosts of us now in some garbage dump?
I have a competing fear in my heart - that a building is just a building and it cannot remember anything, as much as we might want it to. I think I prefer the idea of our ghosts in the dump to the idea of nothing left of us at all.
Am I afraid of returning to California to find the whole history of us has vanished? That my mother has been erased; that the land itself has washed her away and let her go? That my childhood is gone, taken like a house in the path of a tsunami, and that everything I once was has been expunged with it?
At some point during the pandemic, my California driver’s license expired. When I am back in California, I will have to go to the CA Department of Motor Vehicles and try to get a new one. I imagine them asking me, “What is your home address?” and me accidentally saying, “I don’t have a home.” I imagine them telling me - “I’m sorry, too much time has passed. Your California ID no longer belongs to you.”
I guess the question I have is - how much time is too much time?
As a child you don't understand all the ways things can break apart and then disperse, and that holding people together can be the hardest thing of all.
I thought love was enough. It's not. It never is.
In childhood,I there was this broiling chaos below the surface of our family life that I could always feel, and I was afraid would eventually rip everything apart and pull my mother away.
And that's exactly what happened
Since I was a small girl, I worried that my mother would suddenly die, and yet somehow I never imagined what my life would be like without her.
After my mother did suddenly die, I spent some time wondering how it was actually even possible that I could still exist. Part of my grieving process was realizing that I did not know who I was without her, and that I had to learn.
What am I afraid of?
Perhaps I am afraid that I have failed.
My life often feels split into two halves - with my mother and after her.
We had a very complicated relationship, but she was one of the most interesting people I will ever know, and the world is less surprising, frustrating and colorful without her.
My childhood was a whirl of colors and occasions, of parties and festivities, of big feelings and few rules. My home was so full, so wild, so chaotic, so alive. And then it burned out and was gone.
Am I afraid I can never be like her? That I am just a pale copy of such a burning bright woman? That she truly was alive, but somehow I am not? That my life is a wasteland of things left behind, of parties not thrown, of connections not fostered?
Am I afraid that in losing her, I have been cut off forever from myself? That my true life was the life before, the life with her, and everything else is just existing, not really living?
I am afraid that I will never know how to be at home. Wherever I go. Because she is not there.
That it is not she but I that am the ghost.
And when I return to California I will just be haunting a place that has long moved on.
I have spent my life feeling certain that I am responsible for keeping everything I have alive - every relationship, connection, and idea. And every time something breaks or fades or dies, I am sure I am to blame.
What happens when I don't actively maintain a relationship? Does it go to seed? Or is it still there, bulb in the ground, waiting to bloom again?
When we first moved to London I was thrilled our maisonette came with a garden. I thought maybe I’d finally enter my “grows things from the earth and takes great care of plants” era. My mother always had a green thumb, and every year she’d grow wonderful things in our backyard until her anxiety, depression and opioid use stole away her belief in her own capacity to nurture things.
My mother died two weeks after we arrived in London. All my plans about what I’d do there fell away. The garden and so much else lay abandoned. Months passed and I became afraid to even step foot back there, sure that I would find evidence of all my neglect. Sure I would find death and decay. Sure it would be all my fault - these living things were mine to care for, and I had let them down.
When I did finally go into the garden again, everything was wild, unkempt, but thriving. A few things had died, it’s true, overwhelmed by the abundant growth of other plants that had taken over their access to resources. But what I had imagined to be a place of decay, driven that way due to my own neglect, was in fact full of life.
What has time wrought on my past? Will I return to ruins? Or just a bit of wildness, everything overgrown but still beautiful and very much alive?
How much time is too much time?
Text messages start streaming in from friends:
“Hieee! You’re gonna be here so soon and I’m so excited!!”
And
“Oh my god of COURSE I’ll be here. It will be the thrill of my entire life to see you again. And hold you close!”
Suddenly I can’t remember what there was to fear at all.
I am in California.
The moment I step out of the SFO airport, it hits me. The smell. The exact and particular smell of this airport, and this airport alone. It smells like it has always smelled - like homecoming.
We stay in Marin and I see how many of the places I used to know have closed and vanished. How much is unrecognizable.
And yet. I know I am home. It is there for me in the smell of the fallen eucalyptus leaves baking in the early morning August sunshine, the crunch of tanbark on a playground, the mustard and sage in the golden hills. It’s in the galloping fog, the light breaking through the old oak trees, the smell of dust in the bay breeze. It’s in every turn of every street and every rise of every hill, topography forever mapped in my body.
I am home.
California is still mine despite there being no physical house to go to, no walls to close around me. In a way I feel more part of California than ever before; in the loss of the house, mom and everything else, it’s as though the land itself has come to catch and claim me.
I realize now that my fear was not about what was newly lost - but really grief about what was already lost a long time ago. I am learning to appreciate just how much remains to me that is not contingent on mom, but has been nurtured because of who I am and how I have loved.
I have let go. I have moved forward. But I have carried what is important with me.
The truth is that what I was trying to live up to was a little girl’s idea of mother and home.
Yes, for much of her life my mother was more alive than many people could ever hope to be. She thrummed with it. She sparkled with it. She spun with it. And yet the bitter irony was that she found life itself almost unbearably painful. Yes, she made our home a place for love, warmth and connection, but it was also full of darkness, drama and neglect. She managed to poison so many wells and destroy so much of what she built, all because of her own fears of never being enough.
I am trying to find a way to be my own home and become that centerpoint for my children, wherever we are. The root of my own tree, rather than the apple that has fallen.
I now know there are so many ways to make home, be a mother, and beautifully live a life.
I am no ghost. I am fiercely alive.
And I will sparkle in my own way.
If you enjoyed this piece, don’t feel shy - let me know by ‘liking’ it or leaving a comment. Hearing from you helps motivate me to work on the next piece <3.
I’d also be honored if you’d share this piece with anyone you think might be interested.
Pacifica I will always remember your mother and you and Ponder coming to see me at Lori’s office when you were a previous girl. You are a fierce and wonderful writer of truth. Thank you for your openness …just beautiful as I am sure you are…Grace Moreno
It’s always there -- cul de sac, house, pool, laughter, christmas tree, pizza, movie, skunk -- in my memory ❤️