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This past week, I visited my Mémère (my grandmother in French slang) in northern New
Hampshire for the first time in close to two years. This is the longest I have gone without seeing her, but due to many life changes over the last two years and stressful divorce proceedings, it hit the two year mark before I even knew it. I realized something while I was sitting on the couch with her, running around Madison, and laughing with my sister Crystal, my brother Matthew and my brother's family. For the first time in a while I finally felt like I was back at home.
When I was a child we moved around a fair amount due to my parents’ jobs. I was born in
Beverly, Massachusetts (just outside Boston) and when I was pretty young my mom moved our family to northern NH because she desired a quieter way of life to raise us in. When I
was in elementary school, we moved to Clovis, New Mexico when my mom joined the Air Force and after a few years we relocated to Lincoln, IL for my (new) step dad’s position at a hospital. I also spent a majority of my youth traveling to California to stay with my father and his family, sometimes for the entire summer. I was always jealous of my friends in school that lived in the same place their entire lives and had all of their extended family in the same town or area. I don’t know what it is like to have had the same friends since I was in kindergarten because we attended 13 years of school together, to have my entire extended family around a holiday dinner table or to still be able to see my childhood bedroom.
The house that my ex husband and I purchased after we were married, was the longest location I ever legally lived, which was from fall of 2012-May of 2023. I say legally because we had numerous separations through our marriage, where I moved out twice and rented elsewhere for months at a time. When I began pursuing my divorce, I made a decision that I was going to stay in our marital home. Through a majority of 2021 and all of 2022 I lived at our shared home by myself and was determined that I would stay there post divorce because it was my home. I looked into having the master bedroom and master bathroom renovated because a lot of the trauma that I experienced during my marriage occurred in that space. After I decided I wanted a divorce and informed my ex about it in early 2022, I realized that I couldn’t stay in the home. It was being implied to me that it wasn’t my home and it wasn’t ever going to be. When I moved to my first rental in May of 2023, I was excited and ready for a new chapter. I felt safe there and that was a feeling I didn’t experience at my marital home.
When I moved in I immediately set up my space so it would feel lived in; like my home and no one else’s. During my marriage, our house was basically in a nonstop construction zone from early 2013 through the end of 2020. For about five of those years, there was no main kitchen in the house, it was literally a black hole where you could see the insulation in the walls, the paper over the subfloor in the kitchen, no ceiling, it was just a shell. That was something that was really hard on me. When I am anxious, I am a person that needs my surroundings to be neat, clean and orderly. Living in that home, under those conditions, caused me incredible anxiety and I never felt comfortable having anyone over. The kitchen was finally completed by the end of 2020 and that made the house feel a bit more relaxed, especially when I was there on my own and was able to keep it neat and orderly.
My first rental home after filing for divorce I called my “Freedom House.” Freedom meant so many things to me, freedom to feel safe, to keep the house clean and organized as I saw fit, to decorate, and to pick out my own furniture. Freedom to cook things that I enjoyed, to play my music through the entirety of the house, to live how I wanted and saw fit. I loved my first freedom home. I loved living there and invested money into
adding security system and cameras to make me feel as safe as I could be as a single
woman on her own, I wallpapered my office and purchased furniture to fit the space specifically. I had planned to live there for three years and then figure out something permanent.
Unfortunately, leading up to my first year anniversary in the space, I was informed by the owners that they were relocating to another state and wanted to put their home on the market and their Realtor suggested that it be sold empty versus with a tenant. So, after a year of living somewhere that I felt safe and happy, I had to relocate again and really struggled with that. It took me a series of months to find something I was okay with and now I am doing my best to “Heatherfy” it and make it into Freedom House 2.0.
All of this moving and relocating has been really hard on me and not feeling as though I have had a permanent home or anywhere I have roots has been difficult. I think that if my mom hadn’t died and the house in Lincoln hadn’t been sold, maybe I would feel like that was my home and where my roots would still be. Sometimes I feel literally homeless and that is so hard. I feel like I keep moving into something temporary and it can make me feel really down on myself. My mom always said that “home is where the heart is”, but it feels like my heart isn’t truly anywhere. I want to celebrate my new place and enjoy it, but I know rationally that this is also just temporary and I am not able to really celebrate my home due to so many things in my life that just feel up in the air.
Being at my Mémère’s this past week finally gave me a feeling of home, the first in a long time. I could look around and smile with the memories that I made with my Mémère and the rest of my family. I remembered the laughs we shared as we would sled in the yard, I could see the peach tree that the black bear nearly killed trying to get peaches off of the top branches, I could see the sign at the top of the driveway “Welcome to the Tessiers”, laughed to myself about the endless games of Yahtzee that were played and the massive amount of puzzles that were always in process of being created. I remembered how I always hid under the dining room table cloth, the wing back chair that I remember sitting in at their home in Salem, and the memories of when they built the Madison, New Hampshire home. I remember being taught the Lord’s Prayer and the Rosary at the dining
room table and watching endless old movie musicals like “Kiss me Kate”, “Seven Brides for
Seven Brothers”, and so many others with Pépère. Even though the wood stove isn't used for the majority of Mémère’s heat anymore, it was almost like I could hear the crackle of the fire and the comforting smell of burning wood.
My mom was probably right, home is where the heart is; and at the moment, my home is in the mountains with the memories that I created in the last 40 years. I know that my Mémère is not going to be here forever, and eventually moments with her will just be a memory, and I truly hope that the home stays in my family so my siblings and I have a place to visit when we want to head to the mountains. I also have hope in my heart that eventually I will be able to feel like I can celebrate a home and feel like I am somewhere I can finally put down roots. But until then, home is wherever Maggie and I are together and I trust someday we will be able to celebrate our happily ever after.
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