On Home

I have a secret.

Our new house doesn’t yet feel like home to me.

I still look around the rooms, filled with our stuff, filled with our life day to day, and it doesn’t feel like home.

I walk around the house, look at the land and the structure and the space and feel immense gratitude because I love it, but it doesn’t feel like home.

Is it time?

Lately, as I’ve wrestled with this, I’ve been telling myself that I need to give myself a year. I thought it would happen faster.

I know that change takes time. I know that isn’t linear and you cannot rush it. I know that major life changes have a settling period, when they become a part of who you are and you feel them within your being, they transform you.

There will always a be a “When we lived in NY” and a “When we moved to MA”. A before and after.

And I know, that home is a destination, a location, and a sense of being and belonging. It is both physical and not.

It isn’t that our house in Westbury feels like home still, because it doesn’t. I don’t long for it.

Before we left I asked Max to document some of our moments in Westbury. Because it had been home for so long. Because I knew I’d want to have documentation of the memories we made there. Documentation of us in this place that had become a home.

I don’t remember how long it took when I moved there in 2010. But I know when I left in 2018 it was my home.

The thing is, I’ve never stopped feeling like my childhood house was home either. That’s how I know this sense of home is not black and white and can apply to so many spaces and places you exist.

When I look at these I see a home, I see us in that home. But I also see us. And we are here now. I see us embracing a change and moving towards it. I see us being together. I see us in a real and authentic way that I haven’t seen before. There is no posing or primping. It is us together in a house that became a home. And that is what will happen here too.