Returning

Photo credit here.

 A FB friend wrote today of his child’s 6^th year and the “normal” 18 year trajectory leading to college or career, then independence and the child’s own family. He found poignancy in statistics indicating 1) the most time a child is with a parent is the first 18 years of life and 2) on a deathbed, someone wishes for more time with family. With these, he concluded 1/3 of the time he will have the most contact with his child is over and the other 2/3’s will be over in a blink of an eye. He wished to cherish the days while confessing *cherish* may not always be how he reflects on happenings and interactions with said child. 

 

I could argue with the cultural standard he purports: I know of many families with children of ALL AGES living under one roof, often for financial, medical or needs-based reasons. The luxury of education or even having a job which could support independent living is not a given. 

 

However, stepping outside of my childhood home and seeing a scene familiar for most of my life, his words hit notes I do not hear. My husband and I care for my father in the house he built for our family while I gestated. Granted, I left for years, but I came back sensing the importance of doing so. The surreal experience of “returning home” in adulthood strikes dissonant chords some days, harmonic the next, in melodies I never expected to sing.

 

One oddity is the balance (or not) between respecting the surroundings of my father while attempting to make my childhood home seem like my adult home. We changed little in the common spaces for the first couple of years, maybe three. Then we finally moved out my grandmother’s dining table and chairs in the sunroom, rearranged the furniture to open up the space and unobstructed the window with a view, eventually changing the window to a picture window free of blinds. We moved couches out of the den and living room, but mainly shuffled furniture which had been in the rooms 30 years. 

 

Each change helped make the space a little more shared, but the walls still had the four paintings of my siblings and me when we were 2 years old, the painting of my mother and her brother at 5 years old and 2 years old respectively; my father’s high school graduation picture and several other family photos. I looked around and saw my parents’ lives and my childhood, but not my present life or my shared life with J. We lived in the house, but we were still visitors.

 

In February, figuring 2 years of Dad no longer regularly using the den meant we could change it, we tackled the room. J scrubbed, sanded and painted the walls and trim. We took out furniture, added our furniture back in, divided the room into sitting areas and bought new paintings for the walls. With the modifications, the den became “our” den and the house felt a little more like “our” home. 

 

Now, we have started on the living room, but the amount of kitsch is overwhelming. I am in process of wrapping my mother’s keepsakes, mainly bells, from her and Dad’s many travels. The layer of dust inside the closed cabinet betrays its usefulness. I take out each bell and consider my own collections. I picture them tossed in a box with a “free to a good home” sign or, even more likely, tossed in a box then piled high with other boxes on the side of the road awaiting the trash truck. Why keep so much stuff? 

Then I pull out the “Sacred Cat” from the King Tut exhibit we went to when I was a toddler. I remember the trip to New Orleans in the van. How my mom and I played games on the platform Dad built for the back so we could carry all the luggage for 6. I still see the long line snaking its way out of the exhibit hall and then the golden chin rest for a pharaoh carrying too much weight on his head. I tired of all the rooms and all the exhibits, finally sitting against a wall and watching swarms of people look at crafts belonging to a time and culture they could barely imagine – if they tried at all. 

 

“I’ll keep this one,” I think, a circle unbroken.

 

3/5/26