The House That Built Me

On Christmas Eve, like millions of other people did, I went home.  I pulled up to the house, parked my car in the “no park zone” as I’ve done countless other times through my life when I couldn’t find a spot on the one way street, walked up to the door and knocked. The woman who answered was not my mother and looked surprised to see me.  “My name is Erin, and I grew up here.”  That should have been enough for her to embrace me, to swing the door open, to take my coat and whisk me in!  Needless to say I had to provide some credentials before I was let in.  Crazy people don’t show up on your door step every day.  She was gracious enough to let me take a peek inside.

We walked through the foyer….the spot where my teenage boyfriends and I would be able to sneak one last kiss goodbye from the watchful eyes of my parents, and I couldn’t help but smile a knowing smile closing the door behind us as those memories came flooding back.  The living room, completely different…all different!  This isn’t right! I wanted to scream.  The tree wasn’t in the right spot. There’s no way my sisters and I would have had the necessary room to open Christmas gifts where it was located. The furniture was all wrong- this was all wrong, I wanted to tell her.   The floor was now carpeted over the beautiful hardwood that my parents restored themselves as a young couple.  I wanted to tell her the carpets needed to go, you can’t have an 11^th birthday party here, you can’t put furniture polish down on the floor and let 13-14 giggling sleepover attendants run and slide down like baseball players on this floor until they crash into the couch at the other end of the room.  You can’t have dance parties with your sisters this way. 

I wanted to tell her the wall in the dining room wasn’t right either.  Where’s the piece of spaghetti that hung there for ages when Katie and I were learning to be cooks and went overboard testing the pasta to see if it was done?  The table was gone.  The table where we did our homework, where we had Holiday dinners and made important decisions as a family, was gone.  It was the table where we sat as my Grandmom came over shortly after my Dad moved out, and discussed our options with our mom as to how we would handle life.   There was no more closet with the makeshift door falling off of it, the closet that housed so many bits and pieces of whatever you’d need from batteries to your plastic wireless microphone (when you KNEW you were destined to be the next Debbie Gibson or Madonna) to fancy glasses Katie and I would drink out of pretending it was champagne.  

The kitchen was completely restored to the point of unrecognizable.  The cabinets the had installed were all wrong, how am I supposed to know which ones have spices I can throw into a bowl at 8 years old and make my own kitchen show?  The refrigerator my sisters and I bought my mom as a Christmas gift when we were old enough to all have jobs was gone.  The sink wasn’t clogged like it sometimes did in the winter when the pipes froze.  I wanted to ask her if that ever happened, and if when it did, she crawled under the house with a hairdryer trying to economically fix the issue like my mom had. 

The back room, the “mud” room had been turned into a powder room with more kitchen storage, and that wasn’t right.  How would the possum ever find his way home?  The possum who snuck into our house and made a home out of the back of an old cabinet, and who one day showed up sitting on our couch like he belonged there.  Okay, so maybe he was better off outside.

I didn’t venture up the steps.  I didn’t ask to see the rest of the house right then, I felt I’d intruded enough.  But I looked up those steps, the ones Sara, Katie and I would sit in sleeping bags and slide all the way down. The steps we would bounce down every Christmas to see what Santa had brought.  The steps I was sitting on with my back turned to my Dad when he told me the words I already knew were coming “We’re getting a divorce”.  And then, as graceful and classy as I was at 14, I went to run from him and tumbled down the stairs. 

I wanted to tell her that in the first room on the 3^rd floor, tucked away on a side wall in the closet, is a list of boyfriends I had.  I’ve often wondered if that’s been painted over.  In the other room in the closet is a sliding shelf, that’s exactly big enough to hold 3 small girls who are making up their own club.  I wanted to ask her if she ever climbed through my old bedroom window to sit on the roof and stargaze, and wonder what she’d be in five years, in ten years, in a lifetime.  I wanted to know if the bathroom on the second floor still had a mirror large enough to accommodate 3 teenage girls, all getting ready for countless Saturday nights, all in different stages of social activities, the mirror I always thought my Mom would be fluffing my veil in one day.

But I didn’t ever ask.  I thanked her and left. 

I’ve been kidding myself for a long time.  I’ve had one foot in the past, and one inches from the ground of the present, but moving forward has not been easy.  Going home….going back to the start, was my way of closing that chapter of my life for good.  I haven’t appreciated the home I have now enough because I’ve been so busy dwelling on the house I no longer have.   In this very room where I sit now, I got ready for my wedding.  Just above my head is the room where I showed Eric the pregnancy test and said “We did it”.   A few feet away from me is where I crossed the threshold and introduce my 2 day old son his new home.  There has been love here, there have been tears.  There have been good times and there have been not so good times.  There have been backyard barbeques, family dinners, New Year’s Eve parties and snowball fights.  There has been laughter, lots of it.

The house I grew up in was not what I expected it to be when I went back to it.  And that’s okay.  It’s someone else’s turn to make memories there, and closing that chapter of my life is the only way to make this stubborn foot hit the ground and go on with my new start.  The door of my old house, my old life, is finally closed.