by Jennifer McLennan, Simon Fraser University

download Redefining my sense of Home

After the birth of my first son, family and friends kept asking me, “so when are you going to buy a house?” “When are you going to buy a house?” “When are you going to buy a house?” This persistent question left me with the feeling that raising him in an apartment was somehow depriving him of a great childhood. It preyed upon my fears of not being able to recreate my childhood home. It gnawed at my anxiety that I didn’t know anyone who had successfully raised their children in an apartment. Probably my little innocent baby was going to become a psychopath, or a serial killer or much worse, a telemarketer.

Marais district, Paris ©Yanidel (click image for website)

Unbeknownst to me at the time of the birth of my son, this myth of the house with a backyard as being a prerequisite for raising children is largely a North American idea–most of continental Europe lives in apartments. They seem to be doing just fine. Growing up, I fully bought the myth. I assumed that I would automatically be able to buy my dream house before I was thirty. When I turned thirty-five, I panicked. I have two children. We are living in a two bedroom apartment. Where is my backyard? My extra bathroom? My extra space in which to put stuff I no longer want or need? So I did what any good graduate student would do and I took myself to the library in order to find out what was wrong with my life. What I wanted when I started my research on home was a nice tidy answer, a blueprint, a guide. I wanted to be able to follow a method or a system–what I uncovered was a muddle. Home is fraught with tensions–it is a place of refuge, but also a source of confinement.  A place to escape from and a place to run back to.  There are many unknowns as to what makes a “good” home. It is the intersection of many concepts: memory, identity, belonging, location, and time. I started diving into my own memories of home. I am very sensorially aware and most of my dominant memories are grounded in sensory experiences. The following is an excerpt from a longer piece of my sense memories of home.

© Allison Drew

As we pull into the driveway off S. W. Marine, I know that I am entering a different world. There is a mystery as we pass the large wrought iron gate and wait for the house to appear as we drive slowly down the circular drive. The house has a name, Wessex, where we live no one’s house has a name and knowing someone’s address is essential because all the houses look the same. Rectangular BC Boxes–an architectural specialty of south Richmond. The driveway winds and my brother and I look for the lawn animals nestled under the shrubs. The deer stands proudly in the circular lawn; the ceramic rabbits poised to scamper away. Slowly the grey and cream tudor style house comes into view. The sound of traffic is a distant hum as we hop out of our rusty red 1977 Acadian.  I wish I had my bike because doing loops around the circular drive with my streamers flapping in the breeze would be way better than going up and back on our short straight one.

The brass lion knocker is lifted and dropped soundly against the plate announcing our presence to great-grandfather and his house keeper Mary. The four of us crowd awkwardly in the tiny vestibule waiting for the formidable black door to open. I stare at the green Wellington boots that never seem to change appearance or placement and wonder if they are like the lawn ornaments—a necessary item to the aura of the home. The door creaks open and Mary invites us into the high ceilinged entrance. The lighting is dim and oppressive. The furniture is heavy, expensive and foreign. Coats are whisked away into an unseen closet by Mary and great-grandfather ushers us into the den, which is in between the sunken living room and the expansive dining room with cut glass decanters that sparkle. It was only much later that I learned great-grandfather filled them with cheap Scotch, he liked to play with people’s assumptions that what they were drinking was of the finest quality. Tea and fruitcake are served and Mary discretely disappears. I long to follow her into the kitchen, to ask her questions about what it is like to live here and to spy into the forbidden rooms, instead I sit awkwardly on a tiny needlepoint foot stool and try to not fidget.

Wessex (the house)

The rules are very clear. We are not allowed to touch anything. We are not allowed to go upstairs, but we may sit on the landing. We are not allowed to go into the basement. We are not allowed to go into the kitchen because we are not servants. After listening to grownups talk about people we don’t know for what feels like several hours, my brother and I quietly leave the den and tip toe through the dim living room. There never seems to be any lights on, but the curtains are open and windows look out into the garden at both ends of the house. Behind the Chinese screen, we know there is an elevator and we are dying to go up and down. At Christmases, Santa always arrives down the elevator and pops out from behind the screen both terrifying and delighting all the great-grandchildren. Knick-knacks cover the end tables, I imagine the stories attached to their acquisition. I gently touch the small bowl of porcelain flowers. When I was very small, my great-grandfather’s second wife used to lead us quietly through the living room and let us hold the paper weight with the dandelion puff inside. It was so smooth and beautiful. I wanted to keep it. Later when I had read Nineteen Eighty-Four, I understood why Winston risked so much for a paperweight. My great-grandfather’s wife got Alzheimer’s and stopped talking and would sit in a chair in the den with a cup of tea in her hands until it got cold and Mary would take it away. My brother and I easily navigate our way through the furniture. The placement never changes. The seating is clustered into three groups. In our living room, we have one couch and a recliner. The dog sits on the recliner and dares my dad to kick her off. The couch is old and the cushions often become life rafts, shields or fortress walls. We frequently jump off the big IKEA coffee table scattering library books and magazines in our wake which become step stones in order to make it across the green carpet frequently infested with crocodiles and snakes or oozing with lava. Somehow here the lack of dust and clutter slows our pace and we would never dream of sitting in great-grandfather’s living room let alone create an adventure in which we are the heros, the defenders of justice.

We snake our way to the landing and climb the six stairs to sit and imagine what the upstairs is like. In our rectangular house, there are no secrets, no mysterious rooms, no magical kingdoms. Every room has a clear purpose. We have searched every square inch hoping to stumble into something magical, but peeling back the carpet by the heat registers has only revealed hard wood floor and not secret passageways. Our closets all have backs to them even after being tapped three times. We do not have a basement or a crawl space. On the landing in great-grandfather’s house, the sunlight streams in the leaded glass windows making diamonds of red and blue and amber all over the stairs. We count them and invent games, but we want to go home and put on our capes and jump from couch to coffee table slaying dragons, fearing sharks lurking evilly and laughing so hard the record player skips.

According to Clare Cooper Marcus in Home as a Mirror of Self, “our senses have a way of reconnecting us, without warning, to memories of times and places long ago, and in particular to memories of childhood” (Marcus, 19). For me, my great-grandfather had the most interesting home I ever visited. My great-grandfather repeatedly offered his hospitality; my brother and I were always welcome to sleep over, but we never did. While his house seemed more magical and alluring than our own, we never felt at home there. Marcus states that “we hold on to childhood memories of certain places as a kind of psychic anchor, reminding us of where we came from, of what we once were…” (Marcus, 20). Great-grandfather’s house represented a form stability I craved, nothing ever changed–the expectations, the placement of the furniture or the knick knacks, but at the same time I didn’t feel at ease in the space. Through a series of interviews, Marcus explores the emotional ties that people have with their home and their belongings and the importance of home in our development and growth. By molding our physical environments, we are learning about our sense of self. This happens at a very early age with our sense of play. Regardless of culture, social context or gender, children create their own version of a home. Whether it is a fort in the back garden or in an abandoned lot, a house made out of couch cushions or a large refrigerator box, children claim a territory separate from their childhood home as their own in which to practice creating their own sense of home. “They all seem to serve similar psychological and social purposes–places in which separation from adults was sought, in which fantasies could be acted out, and in which the very environment itself could be molded and shaped to one’s own needs” (Marcus, 27).  From these hiding places separate from the adult world we learn about our own emerging sense of self. We gain a sense of possession over these places, we give them names and we define the rules and boundaries. This form of play is essential in creating and defining a sense of home in our adult life. In Poetry, Language, and Thought, Martin Heidegger, expands on our deep emotional and physical need to feel like we belong to a place. The idea of dwelling is essential to human nature and from the safety and security of our dwelling we are able to produce great works. “If we pay heed to these relations between locations and spaces, between spaces and space, we get a clue to help us in thinking of the relation of man and space” (Heidegger, 156). He correlates highly the connection between dwelling and being. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, describes home as a “refuge, retreat, grotto, womb, it gives shelter from outside dangers…l” (Beauvoir, 450). Home becomes a shelter in which to nurture our sense of self. Building on de Beauvoir’s ideas, in the Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton, states “those places whose outlook matches and legitimates our own, we tend to honour with the term ‘home’ (Botton, 106).  From this place of safety and security, we are able ‘to recover the lost, significant parts of ourselves” (Botton, 107). Home also becomes a place of renewal. Botton continues in his definition of home by saying, “ a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to” (Botton, 123). Home is central in our understanding of self and it is essential in developing our feelings of safety and security. Our sense of home begins in childhood with our first sensory understanding of the world. We come to understand our place in the world from the perspective of the smells, sounds, sights, textures and tastes around us. These sensory experiences become the foundation upon which we continue to build our understanding of home. As we grow into young children, our play takes on our understanding of home. In my reflections of my own life, my understanding of home is not the specific childhood houses I lived in, but more the emotional experiences that have gone on there.

Chatsworth. ©Mr.sAg

While houses or specific dwellings have a clear place in our memories, there exists a distinction between house and home. House becomes the physical dwelling and home becomes a more nebulous emotional attachment that is important to our sense of identity and self. Yet, there is no clear set of rules that guide us to create an optimal size of dwelling to create the kind of atmosphere which allows us to go out into the world with the greatest sense of self. Paul J.J. Pennartz has studied the psychological impact that home creates, but has found that it is difficult to study empirically because “atmosphere is an inherent aspect of habituation. Yet it appears to be irrational and indeterminate” (Pennartz, 95). It is this atmosphere that creates a greater sense of home, more than the physical structure. In Pennartz’s article “Home: The Experience of Atmosphere”, he seeks to define the atmosphere created in households that would help to define what makes a house become a home occur. By surveying a group of families living in public housing, Pennartz found that the feelings of home are generated most often when everyone is at home, relaxing and there is no pressure or obligation to be doing something else. He found that “pleasantness and atmosphere do not occur, they have to be created; that is, they result from action or intentional behavior” (Pennartz, 99). His research illustrates that “it is not space in itself that creates atmosphere, but some kind of social action that takes place in the space” (Pennartz, 103). Part of the difficulty in defining what exactly home means is that its definition is context as well as subject specific. While the architectural components of a house play a role in the feelings of homeliness, it is the intentional actions within that space that creates a the feelings of belonging.

The other difficulty in defining home is that it is a dynamic idea. We often want it to be static. We want it to be fixed or stable or constant. But we are dynamic, our characters are dynamic and so we need to accept that what we want or need from a home is also going to change. Yet we also idealize certain aspects of home. “…certain dwelling structures and social relations are imagined to be ‘better’, more socially appropriate and an ideal to be aspired to” (Blunt & Dowling, 100). It is the wrestling with the ideal and the actuality that I struggle with. Will my children actually be better off in a house with a backyard? It is hard to break myths that have been supported by everything I experienced growing up and accept that home is an apartment. For me, moving into a house challenges other definitions of home I have created as it would mean moving to the suburbs, engaging in a commuter culture and me going back to work and no longer being at home with my boys in our new backyard. If I shift one aspect of home, I lose other notions that I use to define home.  A significant part of my definition of home is centered in what human geographers term as place. I have a clear sense of home in living in Vancouver, which is a wider construct than the apartment that I am currently living in. I like walking to where I need to be; I like the diversity I see in living in a city. I like taking my boys to school and picking them up. I thrive in imagining, creating and dreaming with them. These aspects all combine to create a sense of home for me. The work of Tim Cresswell, a human geographer, defines place as something which “must have some relationship to humans and the human capacity to produce and consume meaning” (Cresswell, 7). The central question Cresswell seeks to define is what makes a place a place?  He narrows down his ideas of place from wider geographical areas to neighbourhoods to personal dwellings, home.  “Home is an exemplary kind of place where people feel a sense of attachment and rootedness”; a place “where you can be yourself”(Cresswell, 24). I am fourth generation to live in Vancouver. I have roots here; I am home here framed by the mountains and the ocean. Cresswell’s ideas mirror those of Heidegger, Marcus and de Beauvoir. Regardless of the academic discipline I read, all researchers have come to the same conclusion that home is an essential place which defines our sense of self and allows us to move out of that place to the world as a whole human being.  “Home [becomes] a process of creating and understanding forms of dwelling and belonging” (Blunt & Dowling, 23)

I have come to realize that I create the feelings of safety and security for my children. I am their home. While my great-grandfather’s house had a sense of mystery and an aura of intrigue surrounding it, in my mind it was not a home. It lacked a sense of play, and feelings of safety and security. While I dream of having a house, the fact that we live in an apartment is largely irrelevant to my boys because they don’t know what it is like to live anywhere else. We build forts in the living room and we imagine sharks lurking in the carpet. I hope to create a sense of magic, an atmosphere of safety and security, so that when the boys are older and we move into my dream house they will already feel at home.

Works Cited

Blunt,on & Robyn Dowling. Home.  New York: Routledge, 2006.

Cieraad, Irene (ed.). At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books,1952.

de Botton, Alain. The Architecture of Happiness. New York: McClelland & Stewart, 2006.

Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language and Thought.  New York: Harper & Row,             Publishers, 1971.

Marcus, Clare Cooper. House as a Mirror of Self. Berkley: Conari Press, 1995.