Home - Lost in Transition

In light of the tragic events in Moore, Oklahoma, I have been thinking of the many families who have lost their homes.  As I pondered what it must feel like to lose your physical home (one man said he and his wife had just made their last house payment), I really reflected on what the word "home" means.

Of course, most of us immediately picture a physical structure when we think of a home.  I'm sure most of you can picture the house or apartment or other dwelling in which you were raised.  If we are talking about the physical structures which we inhabit,  I had a few homes growing up.  The physical house where my parents still live would be the physical structure, the house, that I think of when I refer to the home where I was raised.

Having relocated to NYC, I often use the phrase "back home" to refer to the general area where I grew up.  That would basically mean the Dallas/Ft. Worth area at large.  Home can be about the space that feels most familiar to you.  It can be a place that changes drastically or not at all, but either way you always recognize home and its essence.  No matter how much your home area may change (hello, Mansfield!), you still know it as you lived it.  Matlock is still the dirt road I hauled ass down going to school, the Arbors was an empty subdivision where we gathered in high school to socialize, the most you could hope for out of 287 was a Wal-Mart and Pepperoni's, and all of the subdivisions surrounding the old Mansfield High School (now known as Brooks Wester Middle School, named after our late beloved 8th grade US History teacher) will always be open fields in my mind.  The Parks Mall used to be THE place to shop in south Arlington and 360 did not go all the way to 287.  Grand Prairie used to be "over yonder a ways," not abutting the now full-blown suburbia that is Mansfield.  So this is another way we can think of what "home" is - a geographical region where we spent our formative years and/or still spend the days of our lives.

There are terms like "home team" and "home turf" that evoke a sense of safety and belonging.  "Home" games in sports mean playing somewhere familiar and comfortable.  It means playing on a court or on a field where you practice every day, and place where you know the crowd is overwhelmingly in your favor.  The home team has the advantage of last bat (if needed).  The fans of the home team revel in the company of other fans adorned in the garb of the good guys.  Trust me, I stand out at Yankees games every time they play the Rangers, but I understand the way the Yankees fans feel as they converge on Yankee Stadium because I've experienced that rooting for my own home teams - the Tigers at RL Anderson Stadium and the MHS gym and baseball field; the Aggies at Kyle Field, Olsen Field, Texas Stadium (yes, I consider us the "home" team against LSU in the 2011 Cotton Bowl) and G. Rollie White (Reed Arena did not open for competition until after I graduated); the Rangers at the old Rangers Stadium; the Texans at Reliant; the Astros at Minute Maid Park; the Comets and the Rockets at Toyota Center; and the Cincinnati Mighty Ducks at the Cincinnati Gardens just to name a few.  It's a great feeling to belong, to be welcomed and accepted by others in this capacity.

It is this acceptance and belonging that has really helped me to know what my own personal of definition of home really is.  It's any place where there are people to accept and welcome you, and possibly to love and care for you.  For most people, it's the ability to return to where their parents live.  We usually equate our parents with "home" just as much as a building or a place.  I imagine many people take visiting their parents for granted, provided their parents are still alive.  (Should anyone reading have lost a parent, I know you wish you could still visit your parent but know that when your parent was still living, they were most likely ready to welcome you back anytime you chose to return.)  Visiting for holidays or birthdays or family functions can often be homecomings for people who no longer live with or near their parents.  These times bring feelings of comfort and familiarity, and an instant understanding of shared experiences and memories.

This acceptance is something that has been "lost in transition" for me.  On that front, I feel as if I no longer have a home.  Of course this creates a few struggles for me as I continue making this journey called life, and continue making it the way that I know it has to be made.  First, it naturally creates feeling of anguish and loss as lately it's akin to the death of a parent.  Over the course of my adulthood, even before transitioning, I felt that having my parents as the touchstone of home was slowly eroding.  Often I would come home and feel like I was in the way, somehow infringing on the lives they now led in the empty nest, a burden that they tolerated out of obligation.  I'm not sure where this fracturing began, but it was as palpable to me as a vise around my neck.

Second, this creates feelings of resentment that I work very hard to recognize and come to terms with.  The resentment is not directed at my parents because I hold no grudges about the way our relationship has developed (or crumbled).  I actually end up feeling resentment at other relatives who seem to have the undying support and approval of their own parents no matter what they did.  In the course of becoming an adult and navigating adulthood, I made my share of mistakes.  I think life is a tough thing to figure out on many fronts, so as human beings we are bound to make mistakes.  It's the scope and severity of those mistakes that may differ.  I felt that despite my mistakes, I had done pretty well overall.  I went to college and grad school and now have an amazing job with a great salary, I never did drugs beyond the occasional puff puff give, and worked hard to not have to ask my parents for help as an adult.  I did receive monetary help on a few occasions from them, but overall I tried my best to be an independent adult and to allow them to enjoy their lives after I left for college.  So now I find myself feeling negatively towards people who don't necessarily deserve my wrath because I don't receive the same unconditional love from my parents.  Feeling those resentments is a burden that I work on daily in my quest to be the best person I can be.  It's not other people's fault that their parents stand by them no matter what they do.

Finally, this loss of acceptance will always create a sense of inadequacy, no matter what I may accomplish or feel about myself.  When kids want to please their parents but can't they live under a cloud from which they can never fully escape.  Sometimes the dark cloud looms directly overhead and sometimes it's just off in the distance like an approaching storm.  No matter its proximity to me, I can feel it and I know it's there.  Even as self-affirmed as we can all be, even as we grow into adults and feel we finally know who we really are and how to most appropriately express that, even as we feel no doubt about the people we are at our core, lacking parental approval can negate all of that in one fell swoop.  Parents provide the bedrock of any person's life, or at least they should.  No matter how old we get, we all still yearn to know our parents have our backs.  As a child, I felt that was the case and had little doubt about that.  As I grew older and wiser, I began to wonder about that acceptance.

Someone in my position, a trans man who is painfully self-aware and therefore painfully intuitive and sensitive about the world around him, can definitely feel those things on a different level.  What I used to call home becomes less and less of that to me.  The key anchors for me now "back home" are a small handful of people who still greet me with the warmest welcome when I want to return to the Lone Star State.  Now when I think of home, rather than thinking of DFW at large, I think of my tiny Brooklyn apartment where my cats greet me every day, and where the woman it took me 37 years to find spends her time with me.  I never thought I'd think that way; believe me, I always thought I'd feel like Texas was my home, but as connections grow weaker or become broken altogether, I feel less and less like it's home.  This is not a bad thing as long as we all understand what home really means to us.  As I said, I have a small contingent of friends and family who make wherever they are feel like home to me, but in the truest sense of what the word meant to me, my home is gone now.

As those in Moore struggle to put their lives back together, I hope they find comfort in family and friends who always accept and love them.  I know it's difficult to conceive of having to rebuild a new physical structure to replace the one that was lost, the ones the residents of Moore called their homes, but I'd like to think that they have tons of support from people who love and care about them.  In the end, wherever those people are for any of us - the people who accept and love us unconditionally - is where home is (and I guess it's where you'd need to hang your hat!).  Maybe I still have some sense of home in Texas, but it's only a fraction of what it used to be.  I hope all of the parents reading this will remember the importance of accepting your children so they know there is always a safe place for them, a safe place to open up and seek counsel and to take refuge when the world at large may not accept them.  For those reading this who have been supported through thick and thin by your parents, perhaps you should take a minute to go thank them.  I'm assuming you have that kind of relationship with your parents, and that's something to be cherished always.