By Maria Padhila
I want to apologize for last week, first of all. I got caught up in child care — my own and a friend’s — and had to focus only on that. But I should have seen it coming, and made some kind of accommodation.
I’ve been thinking, with all the traveling and shuffling around I’ve been doing myself and seeing others undergo, about home. The whole concept of home — do you have one, do you want one, do you feel like you’ll never have one? What does home mean to you? For many people, I think ‘home’ is inextricable from relationships: an intimate relationship means making a home with someone. Even if that’s not the reality of how we live, I think this is our ideal, our stereotype, our expectation. Moving in together makes it ‘real’.
For others, we’ve had enough of equating living together with true love. I know people of a certain age who find it the height of freedom and luxury — and often the path to romantic success — to have a home or even simply a room of one’s own. Some people have been through marriages and divorces and breakups and home buying and second mortgages and additions for kids and have simply had it. Relationships go here, and living space goes there, thanks. Others are living with grown or nearly so children, and getting away to a lover’s space for days or nights here and there is an escape to another life.
In an article online in Loving More, the polyamory magazine and website, Kathy Labriola runs through a lot of the issues, both psychological and practical, in a way that makes good reading for poly and mono people alike.
She points out that many clients come to her unhappy because they haven’t been able to make living together as a group work. People seem to have an ingrained idea, she writes, that a group living situation is the “ultimate poly ideal,” and they feel like failures because that haven’t been able to reach that aspiration.
“I have often wondered why the ‘living together as one family under one roof’ scenario seems so firmly rooted in our community as the one true path of polyamory,” she writes. “I am guessing that it may be because it is similar to the nuclear family many of us are accustomed to. It is just like being married except you are married to more than one person … Whatever its origin as a model, the vast majority of people who try this ‘all living together’ model find that it does not work for them.”
She looks at common challenges and proposes several different ways to live both apart and together, including what she calls the “shared custody model” — that’s custody of the home space, not of other humans. For many poly people, the reality is caroming from one home to another, much like I did before I was married. It was a way of life that suited me, because I never feel like I have a ‘real’ home. I’ve never felt truly comfortable or wanted anywhere, so living out of a backpack is reassuring to me.
My ideal is the hippie-commune-organic-farm-artisanal-goat-cheese compound, of course, where each family person could have as much together and alone time as he or she likes. We play the lottery every so often in the hope of making it a reality.
My reality is that I’m just barely beginning to feel like where I live with Isaac is my home. Having a child makes a difference — once Tobi became part of the picture, I had to lay my fears aside and make a secure place for her. Or rather, fake it until I could make it my own. My work helps earn the home and the things in it. Still, I’ve never gotten over the feeling that I could be asked to leave at any time. I’m too sloppy, or too noisy, or I’ll break something, or I’ll lose my ability to bring in money, and there I’ll be — evicted. This is my home illusion. What’s yours?
Once at a burn, Chris and I overheard a pair of young men walking by and discussing their camp. “If you want to get the girls to visit your camp,” one said, “you have to have infrastructure. Like a fire pit. And hot cocoa.”
This became a private joke (Chris and Isaac are both very good at infrastructure — the former at building it, the latter at earning it, and both at preserving it. Might have something to do with being so heavily earth-signed.), but it’s the way a lot of people feel.
I find The Great Gatsby an almost inexhaustible text (you’re either a Hemingway, Faulkner or Fitzgerald person and I’m the last), and that’s what this reminds me of. There are people who build a home, literally or metaphorically, and have the parties — make the atmosphere — and through this ritual expect to conjure their soul mate. Build it and they will come, to use another reference. Does this work? Why else do we create these spaces full of our own desires and dreams, arranging everything carefully, if not to people them with friends and lovers?
Isaac and I recently went to a Nonviolent Communication class, and one exercise consisted simply in asking “what do you want?” and “if you got that, what would you have?” over and over. When my partner asked what I wanted, that was easy — I was having severe house envy of the beautiful Victorian home, decorated with all sorts of Asian and African art, where the class was being held. “I want this house,” I said.
“If you got that, what would you have?”
“I’d have a beautiful place for all my friends to live and stay,” I said. It went on and on, and I thought I’d reached the end of it when I hit the usual place, the place where I face being an outsider, being unwanted, having no allies around me. A house full of friends and lovers would seem to negate that. But it went on from there. “Having more people to pay for things would mean I could stay home, and cook, and garden, and write…” I said. And: “If I wrote more, I could work on getting things published.” And: “I would have a legacy — some meaning to my life.”
I don’t know if that’s true, but it was a useful exercise to get at what having a home really means. If you have a home, what do you really have? And if you want a home, what do you really want?
I got the subscriber moon horoscope and it’s uncanny. Really helping change my grumpy perspective. I think I’m channeling Eris.;)
Maria, this is so timeless. Thank you for your work here. It does matter.
Yep, “running away from home”–and Dorothy as patron saint of the sexually different as well. I’ve thought a lot about gentrification over the years too as I’ve watched the space change around me. I’ve lived in several neighborhoods “colonized” by artists and gays and it’s a paradox–can we live in a way that doesn’t displace and disturb others? It would be easy to say that well, I’ve lived the only places I could afford (and probably couldn’t afford some of them anymore!) at the heart of this is my sense of myself as a destructive invader on the earth, not as a needed contributor. And that the earth and nature are not allies but indifferent (and that there’s actually something beautiful in this). This may be “wrong” or “negative,” but it’s based on my experience. Feeling these kinds of things–that humans are just not so great, really–has made Even the simplest interactions difficult. I’m just trying to stay aware and keep my mouth shut until I figure out what’s up. One thing that would help is to have even five minutes where I’m not interrupted, and this is what ties into the problem of work at home being unacknowledged. My paying work is something I’m expected to gloss over so it doesn’t interfere with doing my Most Important work of being a Wife and Mother, yet the reality of that work is unacknowledged and not valued as a reality, only as some strange idealized image. Any creative work I do is not only not valued but is often actively resented or held in contempt. I’m lucky if it’s just ignored, frankly. And just doing this bit of writing on my phone makes me an outlaw. Blah blah I’m a lucky privileged person blah. But sorry, this is reality too. Now I have to go get crap for not doing the laundry right. Bye!
“You bring your space with you”. You’re so right, dear Mysti. Like time really, isn’t it? Love the story about your daughter. Thank you xx
Huffy! Americans and their houses! Europeans and their villas! Latin Americans and their fincas! You just gotta laugh. I have lived in monster places (4 bathrooms, a pool and 3 gardens?… with its own, built-in gardener) and a one-roomed cabin on 5 acres and everything in between. 2007-2011 was in a *tiny* cottage in the historic district in Austin and here’s what I discovered: You bring your space with you.
Now I sorta knew this from my daughter’s birth lo those many years ago. As she was crowning the room tripled in size. And stayed that way for *weeks* after her arrival (everybody noticed, not just me).
The more you meditate *in* your little home, the more you open the portal from Space to space, the larger it will become. Space is *very* flexible, very socially-determined, not nearly as metric as we imagine (or *exactly* as metric as we imagine). Give it a try. You may find entire oceans around you…
Hugs,
M
“The unacknowledged, uncompensated, and often never talked about work done by the people “making” the home, as you do, is one of the biggest life problems I can think of.”
I suppose it would be a problem were I not so happy doing it. I only posted that as I did because too often; working women think “stay-at-home” women have this idyllic life that is really only seen in the media (i.e. having lots of time for personal pursuits and enrichment). The reality is different but I enjoy it all the same.
I always enjoy your articles even tho I am mono-amorous, and a single one at that. I’ve lived alone for almost twenty years– in my own home. It was a struggle at first, after divorcing; I’d never lived alone before. Before marriage I had a decade or more of communal living, seriously, hippie and otherwise. I love my townhome, my own space to be comfortable with my own internal life– in a real community. Ideal for me– to have my own space yet live amongst others who come together for each other; today also known as Co-Housing. That was my hippie experiece once, in Olema, CA. Various small cabins and outbuildings with people living in them, a main house where we came together for meals and music and etc (lots of etc). (see Peter Coyote). Home is many things but to me, most of all, it is a sanctuary.
And I do have a ‘home illusion’ – a beautiful house in the country, with a lovely garden, not a commune, but a kind of home/centre – where people can come and stay, hang out, recharge their batteries, a place where artists and healers can work and help others. A friend of mine is already beginning to realise this with her husband – and I’m happy and grateful for that. Saw a beautiful, abandoned house for sale, near theirs, last month. An impossible dream right now, but hey, you never know..
God I love your humour and honesty, Maria. I ‘ran away’ from home in my early twenties and settled down in another country, language, culture – and have paid the price of ex-pat rootlessness all my life. Though I always felt like a foreigner in my own land, too. I spent a good 18 years moving from one rented accomodation to another, because I was always evicted for one reason or another, till I finally came to settle in my ‘no place like home’ – still rented, but less possibility of eviction (fingers crossed). It’s absolutely tiny, but has a large terrace, on the top floor. I love it, but am also frustrated by its teeny size, and feel a bit uncomfortable sometimes when people come over, and ask me how I can live in such a small place. Though I’ve come to realize that that says more about them than me. Last night I was invited to dinner to a friend of a friends’ house – her own, and I thought, if I could afford it, this is the sort of place I’d like to buy – quite small, but decent size – decorated simply and beautifully. There was a lovely feeling of homeliness and comfort. But I love my den – it’s in a lovely area, near the centre of the city with a huge and beautiful park nearby. This is where my hat is for now, and it gives me a feeling of security and wellbeing. Who knows what the future will bring?
The unacknowledged, uncompensated, and often never talked about work done by the people “making” the home, as you do, is one of the biggest life problems I can think of. Certainly it makes a difference in my own conflicted feelings and actions about “home.” if this work were “monetized,” I doubt anyone could afford to live 😉 That’s how valuable it is…
“Having more people to pay for things would mean I could stay home, and cook, and garden, and write…” I said.”
As someone who is already home doing that cooking and gardening stuff I have to say it doesn’t work out that way. Instead the one who stays home ends up being the hub for everything and everyone else. Because I stay at home, it is assumed (not openly) that I have time to do all the appointment setting, activity directing, bill-paying and finance managing, errand running, administrative assistant duties for the partner, and manage the schedules and social lives of everyone. As soon as one task gets done another moves in to take its place. So writing is not something I have much time for despite my desire to do it. I am everything to everyone and more because I don’t have an outside job taking up time so everyone knows I have more time. I take up the slack for everyone else.
Of course, I have five other people in my life and home that I relate to; DH and four offspring, two of whom are now young adults and one of whom will be an adult soon. Not to mention my 10 year old son. Your life may have fewer people and that may make a difference.