going home
by haywardhelen
‘If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult,
it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding
and accepts responsibility for a life lived
in the midst of such paradox.’
Barry Lopez
I’m sitting high up in the hills, under a tree at a wooden table bleached with age, overlooking the city I grew up in, laid out flat before me. It’s hot, as it so often was growing up.
I’ve lived away from this city for more years than the childhood and college years I spent in it. What then is the hold this city has over me? Half of the family I grew up with, who still live here, are blameless. They couldn’t be more pleasant and giving. They may think of me as selfish in one breath and brave the next; yet they make it clear that they love me for being both.
The city I grew up in still makes demands on me, all of them emotional. It makes me ask big questions of myself. Will I – have I – lived up to my promise? Will I – have I – given enough back in return for my good life? The voice in my head, as I drive our yolk-yellow hire car from the airport across the CBD, thinks not. This voice jumps in to tell me that I’ve only ever earned peanuts – a taunt my mother once made without thinking years ago and I’ve never shrugged off. This voice in my head knows everything yet nothing about me; hence, I suppose, its casual cruelty. This time I manage to catch this voice, just as it, dreamlike, speaks. After hesitating for a moment I relay what it has said to my daughter who, through her silence, makes it clear that she is more interested in finding the road to the hills where we are staying, than in my innermost neuroses. It is late and she is tired and hungry.
I have lots of friends who project their innermost feelings on to the place where they grew up; who can’t see it for the place it really is, so busy are they experiencing it through the prism of their emotional past. Does my inner bully’s taunt at the traffic lights mean that, like them, I’ve never truly grown up? Is this why I so easily regress into self-criticism while driving our yolk-yellow hire car through the streets of my childhood?
Most of the people I grew up with still live in Adelaide. I admire them for this, and sometimes wonder what their secret is. Why didn’t they need to leave the city of their childhood in order to become fully themselves? Was it that they had a less complicated Oedipal relationship with their family? Was a spell living interstate or overseas enough to push them into the next stage of life, cleanly delivering them into maturity? And those who did live away for a period, had they always known that one day they’d return home? What about those who stayed, who never left; were they more extroverted, jolly at barbecues come what may, or just less sensitive than me? Or were they simply more financially sensible? Did they have kinder voices in their head to support them in their journey through life? Lastly, and more troublingly, will my now grown-up children feel similarly about the city they grew up in, and so feel an unconscious need to live elsewhere – just as I did?
My eldest sister, who lives interstate, celebrated a big birthday in Adelaide last weekend. For my sister the city she grew up in, and spent some of her twenties in, is still very much home. Though she’s spent more than half her life living interstate, Adelaide is still her home. Why then is it so different for me? Perhaps I am living in a successful state of denial in assuming that the city that I now live in is home. But then perhaps I can afford to feel this way; life has tested me, just as it has my sister, but not nearly as forcefully.
At her birthday lunch my sister made a speech about the importance of family with tears in her eyes, words our parents would have been proud of, and I silently thanked her for it. And yet even as she spoke it I knew that when my next big birthday comes around I won’t be returning to Adelaide to dance the night away with old friends. I will be up a mountain, walking our dog by the sea, or cooking dinner for friends at home. With any luck, all three.
helen hayward 
I like the sound of your Birthday plans much better than hers. My sister on the other hand will always love the parties and busy-ness and celebrations of it all. We are so very different aren’t we taking comfort in vastly different ways. Home is where your heart is.
Yes we are different, socially and temperamentally. In a way it’s about what we are able to take in and make use of. Not sure how much choice we have over this. Perhaps it’s about birth order! Thanks for reading, Helen.
I never planned to live and bring up my children in the place where I lived from the age of 9. I went away to University, travel and work and ended up back in my village and met an Egyptian man who didn’t want to leave where he was trying to establish himself. I have just put in an application for secondary school for my eldest-the same one I went to and it feels very odd. This was not my childhood dream and yet what I have found in ‘staying put’ is that I have worked through those longings of ‘fleeing’, certain issues and emotions that caused me anxiety and unease at returning to my village are no longer there. My younger sister on the other hand has done the opposite and so perhaps birth order does play a role. However, I would much rather walk up a mountain for my birthday so we are all different indeed.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply, and for your readership over the years. Your response is a great counter, perhaps the counter, to my musings. I imagine many of my school friends might feel similarly. Perhaps you were less screwed up to start with! Although, reading through your words for a second time, my main thought was that your marriage to an Egyptian sculptor may play the role of difference for you, that place does for others. Lastly, it must be nice to know so well whatever mountain that you choose to climb.