Physical or a Feeling. What is Truly a Home?
I am a clean freak. Thus this is hanging on our mantle. I read it 100 times a day.
Your house is small and dirty. (So there.) That statement was the trump card another child played in his argument with my oldest son (apparently over legos). The six-year-old couldn’t have understood the “grown up” interpretation of his words, the comparisons made by adults in attempt to “win” in the material world and therefore life itself. But neither could my 10-year-old son comprehend such craziness. He was, not surprisingly, hurt by the critique. Small and dirty implied his world was inadequate, that the place his father and mother provided for him was, well, small and dirty.
When my son told me about this, I recalled apartment #319 in university family housing, my husband’s and my first home. It had sweaty floors when spring warmed the air quicker than the concrete. Cockroaches made a barracks out of our kitchen cupboards. And it was about the size of a two-car garage. That was small and dirty. But fast forward to the present. Our home has a two-car garage but it’s certainly not a McMansion. It is mold- and roach-free. Yes, there are legos strewn about, in a perplexing but perfect order that only my son understands. I’m told that good homes have sticky floors, dirty ovens and happy kids, which is reassuring as we have the sticky, dirty and (most of the time) happy down-pat. There may be grit on the kitchen floor from making cookies and some toothpaste dried in the bathroom sink but that’s just life.
However my son, upset and with hurt feelings, didn’t need to hear my from-whence-we-came real estate story. My “Roach Approach” wouldn’t do squat for the emotional lashing my son felt. And he was sophisticated enough that the easy answer of kids-can-say-mean-things-sometimes would not comfort him. At age ten, especially at age ten, my son needed to hear something more, a basic life lesson. Something to help him work through the frustrated words of someone much younger, but felt at a much higher level. So I said to him:
“Kiddo, it’s not how a home looks, it’s how a home feels that’s important.”
It won’t pass a white glove test. It doesn’t contain exquisite furnishings. But our house is a home. Cushy pillows and a dog and loads of legos. There is fun, there is love and it is a safe place. The place where my son and his brother and sister can always be themselves and be accepted for the great kids they are.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit rattled by small and dirty. I wondered why this child didn’t choose a more six-year-old-like insult and hurl a “You stink and your legos are yucky!” my son’s way. But it doesn’t matter. Because as the wall in Jimmy John’s sandwich shop said so well:
