The Ache for Home

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou

We finally moved out of my sister-in-law’s place and got an apartment.  Our own space.  But it wasn’t really our own. Our landlord, who lived in the apartment below us, was constantly complaining about our kids making noise above him.   One evening he stopped up and gave me his first ultimatum: “You need to keep your kids from running or jumping or dancing on the floor or we are going to have to ask you to move out!” 

“Was that in our lease agreement”, I thought to myself?  “Can he honestly do that to our family”?  “Doesn’t he know how much our family has been through the past few months”?  “How do you keep little children from playing or running or making noise”?

But I found myself trying, feeling constantly on edge that he’d come upstairs to talk to us about the noise, or bang a broomstick on his ceilings to announce that the kids were too loud, again.

One day I had enough.   It was a Saturday.  Saturdays were especially testing.  It was brutally cold day in middle of winter and we only had one vehicle.  My wife drove to work which meant I was home with our two small children, all day, one of which had just learned how to walk.  Our landlord had stopped a second time the night before to give me his second ultimatum: “On Saturdays my girlfriend and I like to sleep late so you need to keep your children on the third floor in the attic until 10am.  If you don’t do that you will have to leave”. 

“10am!!!  Are you freaking kidding me!!!”, I thought about yelling back at him as he left, but thought better of it.” 

Our children, like every other child under the age of 6, wake up at the crack of dawn. 

How am I supposed to do that, I questioned.     

It made me angrier just thinking about his comment. 

I’d been home with the kids all day while my wife was at work. Our landlord had been banging on the ceiling a lot that day. I struggled, trying to keep them quiet. I felt as if I was walking on eggshells all day long. I desperately wanted out. I was exasperated and annoyed. I was at my wit’s end.

When my wife came home, I immediately walked past her and out the door. She asked where I was going.

“ I don’t know. I just need to go.”

I headed on foot to the closest bar. I like a beer sometimes, but am no means a heavy drinker. But that night I didn’t care.  I was in the midst of one of the most difficult seasons of my life and I didn’t see a way out.

It seemed like everything we tried, didn’t go the way it was supposed to.  We couldn’t catch a break. 

In seven years of marriage, we had moved seven times, and most of those moves weren’t by our choosing.  One of our landlords never fixed any issues at the house which meant that many issues got increasingly worse over time. At another apartment we remember being awakened at 3am our very first night because the cops had been called on our neighbor for domestic violence.  His antics didn’t end but continued for many months causing many restless nights of sleep.  Following that place, our next stop was in my sister in laws attic.  We had moved in with her family after I decided to leave my job suddenly –we didn’t have a place to live.  I left my position assuming I would be able to get another one shortly, but days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. 

Author Maya Angelou once said, “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go and not be questioned.”  Her words couldn’t me more true. 

It wasn’t just the moving which caused so much restlessness inside of us; it was the need to belong.  Somewhere.  Anywhere.  There is nothing worse in this life than feeling as if you don’t have a safe place to go, a safe place to be yourself, a safe place to simply BE.  But that is how we felt. 

I wish I could say that that was the last instance we felt that way, but it wasn’t.  There was more moving, more uneasiness, more discomfort in the next few years.

But truth be told, we had each other.  Through it all, our marriage stayed strong, our family shared love, and our faith carried us through. 

As of March 2013, we moved into our first home together.  We couldn’t be happier.  We may not have gotten our dream home, but what we gained was something so much more important—that safe place where we can simply be who we have been created to be.     

We look back on those experiences with much gratitude.  Certainly, we often felt like wanderers searching for the Promised Land.  But each of those experiences has given us a passion to help those who feel as if they don’t belong, as if they don’t have a safe place in their own lives. 

We all have an ache to belong somewhere, anywhere.  We all need a home where we can be safe, where we can be understood, where we can be unconditionally loved.  Sometimes the homes of our birth are those places—and that is good.  We wish that for everyone; but, we know that for many that isn’t the case.  And for them, “home” must be found somewhere else.  But it is in this search that we find that we learn the most about ourselves, about family, about resilience, about faith, about love, about hope.       

My prayer is that you could find “home”—that you could find that place of comfort and security and safety; that place where you will not be questioned and rejected; that place where you can open your soul and know that no matter what you will be taken in and enveloped by the warmth of love, grace, compassion, care, and acceptance. 

Photo by Nick Hillier on Unsplash