Discussion Question: What is home?
Questions to Ponder:
1. Are you emotionally attached to one location on this planet? Or more than one?
2. Do you feel attached to one place as home? Is it related to where you grew up? Is it different than the place you live now?
3. Is your city your home? Your country? The world?
4. How do you decide what you are attached to?
5. What does home mean? What makes up home?
6. Is home where your toothbrush is?
7. Is home where your cat is?
8. Is home where your family is?
9. Is your relationship to your family optional, like choosing friends? Or is it a ‘sacred bond’?
10. What is private? What is public?
11. Why do we need to distinguish between the two?
Discussion Question: What is home?
Choose a position:
Team A) _______________________
Team B) Home is whatever house you live in currently, a convenient place to stash your stuff.
Team C) Home is our psychological safe space, where we can ‘be ourselves’ without anyone’s disapproval.
Team D) Home is family and our relationships with the people we are related to by blood or marriage.
Team E) Home is whoever we choose to be emotionally attached to, and also live with.
Team F) Home is the place we were born and grew up in.
Excerpt 1: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/09/AR2007100900411.html
I never thought I would end up here, barefoot in my kitchen, humming to gospel music on a Sunday afternoon. My hands wrinkled from water. My belly pressed against the kitchen sink. I shift my weight and go between counter and refrigerator, moving around my kitchen with the confidence of womanhood, pulling out pans and cutting boards, imitating the women of my childhood.
Life is funny how it takes you back. Despite all the places you've been. Sometimes it stops you and reminds you of the lessons you were once taught. Tells you not to forget where you came from.
And you end up in the kitchen with your memories. And the water is running, and you are washing a chicken, the way Mother did. Dumping cups of flour in a brown bag, shaking in seasoning, salt and pepper, heating up oil in a cast-iron skillet. Waiting for the oil to get hot, the way Mother instructed. Dropping in just a touch of flour to watch it bubble. Coating the chicken with the flour and placing the chicken in the oil, tenderly, piece by piece. Jumping back from the oil as it leaps from the skillet, chasing you like it did when you were a little girl.
Excerpt 2: http://www.helium.com/tm/674539/could-today-havent-there
I want to go home.
I wish I could go home today. I haven't been home in a long long time. I want to go home and I want my Mama to be there and I want her to see my kids. I want to talk to my Dad about nothing and everything and I want him to remember every word I said. I want my daughter to see one of the rooms I slept in when I was a kid, maybe the one I decorated once with crayola markers and care bear stickers. I want to take my son to my grandpa's farm and catch lightning bugs in a jar with him. I want to show him the trails where I used to go walking with my Dad. I want my brother to be my idol and my arch enemy. He was mean as a rattlesnake on some occasions, (LOTS of occasions..), but he wouldn't let anyone else be mean to me. I want to know I'm at Granny's house finally when we pull up because she left the lamp in the den on for us so we can find our way home. I want a place where I can go and I can stay as long as I want a place where they need me and they'll be sad to see me go. I want to go home.
I'm a military wife, my home is where ever they send us. This is the 5th one we've had in almost 10 years. I make friends and start to feel at home again and they all leave and I'm alone again. I'm feeling sorry for myself because I just want to go home.
Then I look around and I see everything we have and its not a lot and its not the best but its ours. I see all the things that remind me of my mother and I think she can see my kids whenever she wants to. My Dad called me today just to talk to me about nothing and everything and I remember every word he said. My daughter is down the hall sleeping in one of the rooms that will be hers when she's a child. She decorated it herself with crayola markers and strawberry shortcake stickers. ( I don't know what gets into that kid!) My son is in his room with his glow in the dark solar system stickers all over the walls dreaming about the trails Daddy is going to take him on tomorrow. My brother comes to visit and the first thing he does is tell me how old I look and the last thing he does before he leaves is ask if he can do anything for me before he goes. My husband is in bed pretending to be asleep but he left the lamp on for me so I can find my way.
Granny's lamp is on my dresser and I look at it and I remember what it felt like to pull up at her house and see the light from the window. They need me here and I'll never leave because I would be sad to go, this is where I belong. I wish everyone had a place like this to go home to.
