Reflections from the Publisher: Home Base

Home Base

I’ve never thought of myself as a sentimental person, but this leg of the parenting journey is forcing a bit of soul-searching. I’m writing this on the Sunday before Thanksgiving—my favorite holiday on account of (a) the gluttony that one is more or less expected to engage in; and (b) because beyond a dessert, side dish, or bottle of wine, the price of admission includes very little gift-giving. Christmas is another good excuse for gluttony of course, but for me, the experience is made fraught by the necessity of coming up with appropriately-chosen gifts for everyone.

Gift-giving has made me anxious since one Christmas early in our marriage, when I made the rookie mistake of taking literally my wife’s declaration that we “should keep Christmas simple this year” by not buying extravagant gifts. Imagine my surprise on Christmas morning, when she and everyone else in the extended family that I had just married into, turned up bearing generous armfuls of thoughtfully-chosen gifts. In that context, the novelty toothbrush that was the only thing I had gotten her didn’t go

down terribly well. But on Thanksgiving there is no such pressure. Give me a stocked bar, a Volkswagen-sized turkey to roast, and a dozen friends and family members to feed, and I’m on familiar turf.

Even better, this Thanksgiving represents the first time our daughter’s been home since August, when she started college a thousand miles away. We’ve missed her, and the prospect of having her back in the fold—surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of the only place she’d ever lived until her college adventure began—has gotten me thinking about how the concept of “home” changes once your kids grow up and leave. And what “home” needs to be for them when they come back to visit, too.

Before we were married, my future wife and I spent a couple of years working our way around Central and Western Europe. Following the same playbook as generations of twenty-something backpackers before us, we shuttled between summer and winter resort towns, supporting ourselves in each location with a few months’ menial work in some restaurant kitchen or beach bar until the season ran its course and the time came to move on.

Between seasons, with our Louisiana and Australia homes beyond the reach of our meager resources, we fell into the habit of going to England, back to the big, old, seaside house where my grandmother lived, which had been a constant if rarely-visited presence in my life since earliest childhood. After months spent living in whatever dingy, seasonal worker accommodation we’d been holed up in, the pleasure of settling back into that lovely, familiar old home for a week or two—where every sight and smell evoked rose-colored childhood memories and each creaking stair felt like an old friend—seemed the very epitome of belonging. During those years, the “home base” that was my grandmother’s house represented security—a redoubt to which we could retreat to get our feet back under us and make sense of all the new experiences we were having. It was probably what enabled us to travel so far and for so long. We could play at being grownups, abroad in the world pretending at independence, all the while secure in the knowledge that should anything really go pear-shaped with our rather precarious lifestyle, refuge was never very far away.

Now it’s our turn to do the same for our own kids, and what better place to begin than Thanksgiving? As a result, preparations have been out of all proportion to the size of the crowd we’ll be feeding, with all the turkey procurement, side dish preparation, and Sister Schubert Roll-stockpiling that has been going on for days. Our daughter will be here, of course—joined by a new college friend from a country with no Thanksgiving tradition to travel home for—so there’ll be more than enough to give thanks for. Of course, by the time you read this, Thanksgiving will be behind us and it’ll be time to run the Christmas gift-giving gauntlet once again. But that’s okay, because having both our almost-grown, proto-adults back home to help us reflect on the rich journey that’s brought us to this point, will be all the gift we’ll ever need. Happy holidays to all.