The House You Grew Up In, Now Someone Else's

If the house you grew up in still stands, and you still go near the place, then you know the specific thing I mean, because you have done the specific thing I mean: you have driven past it, slowly, and slowed down more than you meant to, and felt something turn over in your chest that you were not braced for, at the sight of your whole childhood standing there wearing the wrong colour of door.

Because it is never quite right anymore. The door is a colour you would never have chosen and your parents never chose. The tree is gone — the big one, the one you climbed, the one you are almost certain was load-bearing to your entire childhood, cut down by someone who had no idea. There is a trampoline in the yard where the garden was, or the garden is where the driveway was, or the whole front is paved now, and there are toys that are not your toys, and a car that is not your family’s car, and behind those windows, in those rooms, in your rooms, are people you have never met, living their ordinary lives, with no idea whatsoever that they are doing it inside the container of your entire formation. And you slow the car, and you look, and you do not stop, because there is nothing to do, and you drive on with the strange grief of it sitting on you, and you probably don’t mention it to anyone, because how would you even say it.

The place that outlived you

Here is what I think the grief actually is, because it is not simple, and the simple version — sad, my childhood home was sold — does not account for the specific vertigo of it.

It is this: the house survived, and that is somehow worse than if it had burned down. If the house were gone — demolished, replaced by a parking lot — you could mourn it cleanly, the way you mourn anything that ends. But it is not gone. It is right there, fully intact, continuing, going on with its life, hosting an entire other family’s entire other childhood in the exact rooms where yours happened, and its survival is a particular kind of wound, because it means the house did not need you. You thought, in the deep unexamined way you think about the place that made you, that your childhood and that house were the same thing, fused, that the rooms were the memories. And the house has now demonstrated, conclusively, by carrying on perfectly well without you, that this was never true — that the house was just a house, that your childhood was something that happened inside it and left no trace it cares about, that the marks on the doorframe recording your heights have been painted over by people who did not know they were a graveyard, and the house did not object, because the house never held your childhood at all. You held it. The house was just where you were standing.

That is the vertigo. The place you thought contained you turns out to have been indifferent to you, and its indifference is proved by its survival, by the wrong door and the missing tree and the strangers’ toys, by the plain fact that it is doing perfectly well as somebody else’s now, as if you had never been there, as if the whole of your childhood in those rooms had left no more mark on the house than a guest leaves on a hotel. You loved it as home. It was, it turns out, real estate, and it has moved on, and you have not, and you are sitting in a slowed car in the road watching your own formation get on with a life that does not include you.

The strangers in your rooms

And then there are the strangers, which is the last turn of it, and the one that unexpectedly softens the whole thing if you let it.

Because behind those windows, in your bedroom, there is very likely a child right now who thinks that room is theirs, wholly and unquestionably theirs, the way you once thought it was yours — a child who is, at this moment, laying down in that exact room the same kind of deep formative memory you laid down there, who will grow up and move away and one day drive past that same house, slowly, and feel this same grief at the wrong colour of a door that is, by then, wrong to them, painted over by whoever comes after. The house is not indifferent, exactly. It is serial. It holds one childhood and then releases it and holds the next, faithfully, room after room, generation after generation, and every family that passes through believes, while they are in it, that it is theirs and always will be, and every family is wrong, and the house does not mind, because minding was never its job — its job is to stand there, and hold whoever is inside it now, and let them believe.

So I have made an odd peace with driving past. It still catches me, the wrong door, the gone tree, the strange car in the drive; I still slow down more than I mean to; I still don’t stop, because there is nothing to do and the current family would not thank a stranger idling in the road staring at their windows. But I no longer feel only the loss. I feel, now, a kind of rueful fellowship with the child I cannot see in the window of my old room — the one who thinks it is theirs, who is right now filling it with the memories that will one day ambush them from a slowed car — and I drive on, and I let the house keep them, the way it once kept me, and I try to be glad, and mostly manage it, that the rooms are not empty, that my whole childhood’s container is not a ruin but a home, going on without me, holding someone else’s everything now, the way it will hold someone else’s after them, faithful and serial and entirely, forgivably, done with me.