What Feels Like Home to You?
Plus my fav house shoes, justice for Kate Winslet, and does size matter.
Last week, feminist journalist (and friend of BT!) Lyz Lenz wrote a powerful piece about what the idea of “home” means now, in an era where our reproductive rights are under siege, along with the right to escape a bad marriage:
talked about what her own home means to her, as a single mother who has put blood, sweat, tears and money into renovating it. I’m equally emotionally invested in my own home, which has undergone a little post-divorce reclaiming. And I’m equally annoyed whenever someone—usually a man—comes to my house and asks, “Are you okay, living here all by yourself?”…Women are being pushed out of public life and back inside our homes. […] Billionaire-backed PR machines for traditional values have remade the mother and homemaker as aspirational. Thin, white femininity is once again the idealized norm. […] And yet, even as a new administration gears up to pass more laws further controlling women’s economic freedom and participation in public life, more and more single women are buying homes.
In theory, they ask this because I live in the woods and we have bears, plus my nearest neighbors are within eyesight but not shouting distance, should The Killer find me. (That’s what the emotional support hammer is for!) But they also ask this because I am a woman, living alone and unguarded by a man. And yet somehow, confusingly, I am nevertheless in control of an entire building, plus a garden.
Yes, that has come with a learning curve, and yes, I sometimes still wish I didn’t need to ever think about my HVAC system. But I love being in charge of my own house. I’m always figuring out some new piece of the home ownership puzzle. (A friend just recently taught me how to build real wood fires in my fireplace after a year of just lighting Duraflame logs! I’m obsessed!) I love making all the decisions. I love a crowded table. I love when the place fills up with my friends, or my kids’ friends, or both.
I love taking up space here, and sharing this space with people I love.
Of course, there is also a lot of privilege underpinning the kind of security and space taking that both Lyz and I are describing. Home ownership is wildly out of reach for many Americans. But making a home and claiming a home wherever you live is maybe less so. Home might be a literal building, but it can also be a community, a shared meal, a garden, a hug.
“Home can be a prison,” wrote Lyz. “But when a home is your own, a place where family is what you decide, where the space offers rest and respite from a world that is increasingly hostile to your autonomy and even your life, then home can be a place of resistance.”
I’d love to know how you’re conceiving of home right now. Is your home a place of resistance? Does it feel like the space you want it to be, or is it still a work in progress?
And, how do you take up space when you’re at home?
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Tuesday Links & Recs
Every year I consider all the other slippers and every year, I end up wearing these and only these.