Homegoing
I’m writing to you from the home I grew up in. Sitting at my favourite spot at the kitchen table, the one my dad and I used to fight for. It’s the seat by the radiator because we’re both always looking for warmth. My mother and brother never cared so much, but we would jostle each other out of the way, vying for heat, until my mother would inevitably snap at us both to stop leaning on the radiator because we’d pull it off the wall one of these days. We never did. The radiator is the same one my young self, teenage self, and adult self have leant against. It’s the same, but everything is different.
Home is not the same as it used to be. I am not the same as I used to be, and I always find it difficult to come home. It wasn’t always this way, however, and as I sit here, the heat of the radiator pulsing against my back, I wonder what it is that makes it so hard, and why as the years pass me by, it gets harder and harder.
When I first moved to London in 2013, I came home often. I would excitedly rush to Kings Cross to catch the Friday train back to the north, still tethered to my life here. The birthday party I couldn’t miss. A wedding. The scout event I had to be at. The nephews I wanted to hang out with. The babies to cuddle. The moments not to be missed.
I would come home like a returning soldier for my parents to pamper me in a way they never did when I lived here. I cannot remember a time my mother changed my bedsheets for me – she was not that type of a mother and nor did she need to be – but I would arrive home to fresh sheets in my old bedroom, courtesy of my mother, a hot water bottle placed in my bed, courtesy of my father, and the fridge filled with the things I liked to eat. A fresh cream cake was always sitting ready for me. I was never homesick, but I enjoyed coming home.
But life stubbornly marches on, and as the years passed, I found myself coming home less and less. My friends, bar one, moved to London or other cities that offered more opportunities than the crumbling north. My brother, sister-in-law, and two nephews also moved south. Cousins scattered across the country to the families they married into. People grew older. The house became quieter. My parents stopped talking to one another. They got divorced. My mother moved out. The wider family fractured. Health declined. The tether of the north frayed and instead of a web of people holding me here, now there are only two, and they live in separate houses.
The easy answer is divorce, however, it’s not the full answer. Of course, it’s harder because shipping yourself between two parents, trying to divide the time equally so no one feels hurt, is hard, but in all honesty, it was hard long before the divorce. The framed picture of the happy family laughing around the dinner table was not our family. We had the occasional moment, but mostly it was two kids bouncing between two adults who never should have gotten married. It doesn’t make for a particularly idyllic setting.
The more complete answer is that as our parents get older, as we watch them slow down, as the occasional tremble afflicts their aging bodies, the burden of care begins to cement around our shoulders, particularly for women.
