It’s not that the dream of the stable home disappeared – it just started charging an untenable monthly rent
M
y special talent: I can survey any room in a house and accurately estimate how many cardboard boxes and spools of bubble wrap are needed to efficiently contain its contents. I wish it wasn’t a personal point of distinction, but I can’t escape it: I’ve lived in 28 homes in 46 years.
In my middle-class midwestern family, two rules reigned: you never questioned going to Catholic Mass on Sundays, and you never asked why we kept moving – the only answer was always the same: “It’s for your dad’s job.” And so we followed him, the car-top carrier on our wood-trimmed station wagon bursting with clothing, mix tapes and soccer cleats as our eyes fixed on passing cornfields.
Being jostled between addresses became the defining characteristic of my coming-of-age 1990s girlhood. I’m now 46, and I can’t seem to stay in one home longer than a handful of years. That same geographical stability I craved as a child has become an emotional confinement. I’m terrified to make an offer on another house; it would signal permanence in a body pulsating with restlessness.
