I’ve been thinking about what it means “to go home for the holidays.'
I teach students at Valparaiso University that at this point in the semester begin to count down the days—not just to the end of writing papers and taking tests, but also counting down to go home—in order to experience favorite restaurants or favorite family meals and traditions. As I listen, nod, and smile, I want to tell them my story about how I used to count the days, too. But there’s not enough class time to listen to their stories AND to tell mine. But if I could tell my story, I’d tell it like this…
I didn’t grow up in Valpo.
Over a decade ago, I drove into town in a black Volkswagen Jetta, stuffed to the roof with everything I owned, including a gray cat that protested with pitiful meows all the way up from Indianapolis.
Although set up at Golfview Apartments with two bedrooms full of furniture and wedding gifts, Valpo was merely a place to sleep during the work week. Come Friday afternoon, Eric and I packed the Jetta , steered towards 65 South and headed “back home”—to the house where I’d lived since I was ten years old. On our weekend visits, I got my haircut at the same place I’d been going since 7th grade. We got our car serviced at a body shop near the apartment where I’d lived the four years before Valpo. We went to the same movie theatres we’d always gone to and shopped at the same mall. On Sunday evenings, we gathered at my parent’s dining room table and ate lasagna with my family--just as I’d done for as long as I could remember.
We acted as if we’d never moved away. And for several years, despite the fact that we’d left the apartment and even bought a house in Valpo, we still packed up on weekends. The Jetta hummed on auto-pilot as it wore down the highway with our back and forth.
It didn’t surprise anyone in Indianapolis when I got pregnant that Eric and I considered an Indianapolis birth. But when objectively thinking about the miles between our hometown and our new town, then thinking about the time we spent in the car splitting ourselves between both places, it felt irresponsible to continue to deny that we belonged in Valparaiso.
So, one Monday morning, only a little bit pregnant, but a whole lot queasy, I called a Valpo doctor. Soon after, I found a new place in Valpo to get my hair cut and a new place in Valpo to have the car serviced. Not long after that, Andrew was born in Valpo—at Porter Hospital. Then just over two years later, I found myself back in the same room delivering Adrienne.
With two children, a second and third cat, a new car and a bigger house, it became less practical to pack up on Friday afternoons. As the kids grew older and weekends turned into basketball games, gymnastics, birthday parties and play dates, leaving town was logistically impossible.
And so as much as I wanted my kids to know Indianapolis—to walk the same streets I did when I was their age, or as much as I wanted Adrienne to get her haircut at the same place I went, or for Andrew to go to birthday parties at the same movie theatre I always went to, my hometown moved further and further into the backdrop of our lives.
There was a time a few years ago when I sulked about the way things had changed—how memories of home now trumped the experience of home. But before I had time to pout about it, I realized that the tables had turned which made me wonder if my definition of home had been wrong all along.
Spending so much time looking backwards, I forgot to look at what lie before me. How could I have failed to notice that Indianapolis now comes to me? My mother packs the bags and my father prepares the car. Then they set their own auto-pilot—wearing down the highway with their back and forth. They don’t come every weekend, but they come enough to have a favorite gas station and a preferred restaurant. Sometimes they stay for lasagna. And when they do, I’ve learned to realize that home is more about the people sitting at the table than the city where the table sits.