There's No Place Like Home

“Where is home?” people occasionally ask while getting to know me. For me, that’s a loaded question! Every time it comes up, I make a split-second calculation—how much should I tell them?

You see, I’m an Army brat. Once you know that, you know an awful lot about me. If you didn’t grow up in the military, you can’t know how different this sub-culture is from the “civilian” culture. And we brats don’t need you to know, not most of the time, anyway. We know how to adapt, and that way you don’t have to know what we’re really like.

Yes, we move a lot. Well, anyway, brats of my vintage mostly moved a lot; these days things may be different. I moved less often than most brats, and I came back to the same places a couple of times, so I’m not the typical brat. Here’s what it looks like for me:

1956	Born in Fort Leavenworth, KS
1956-1962	Arlington, VA (kindergarten)
1962-1963	Newport, RI (first grade)
1963-1964	Babenhausen, Germany (second grade)
1964-1967	Frankfurt, Germany (third-fifth grades)
1967	Carlisle Barracks, PA (sixth grade)
1967-1970	Arlington, VA (sixth-eighth grade)
1970-1972	Frankfurt, Germany (two houses, ninth-tenth grades)
1972-1974	Arlington, VA (eleventh-twelfth grades)
1974-1978	Oberlin, OH (parents moved to Bozman, MD; I went to college)
1978-1980	Middletown, CT (two apartments, first real job; early marriage)
1981-1982	Oakland, CA (firstborn child)
1982-1984	El Sobrante, CA (second child)
1984-2007	Vienna, VA (two locations, two more children)
2007-2015	Broadway, VA (children grown and gone)
2015-present	Front Royal, VA

That’s 20 different houses, apartments, dorm rooms, whatever, not including my parents’ house, which was only a place to stay for a couple of summers. (My experience is less mobile than it could be. Most brats have moved more often than that and didn’t bounce between two places, as I did.) Each place was “home,” but none was a deep-down home, calling to me.

Sometimes I wake up and remember that I dreamed about home again. When I dream of going home, it’s always a dream of trying to buy the house in Arlington. I lived there for 11 years in three stints. In my dreams, somebody has changed the house in some odd way, and I can’t afford to buy it, but I keep trying. And that’s funny, because I don’t want to live there. Still, I was very annoyed when I looked up the house for this blog post and found that the owners had recently added a front porch. What the heck? Don’t they know that that house is perfect just as it is? How dare they? This picture shows what the house should look like; it’s from only a few years ago.

“Home” mostly been northern Virginia. That’s what I know best. I get a sense of home when I think about Germany, too. I spent six happy childhood years there. It’s kind of a bittersweet “home” feeling, because I grew up living in an American community, and everything American there that I knew has been given back to the Germans. No hard feelings, mind you; that was the right thing for the US to do. I just can’t go to that “home” again. See what it looks like near my old high school?

Vienna, VA, was “home” for the longest period of time, but my husband and I kind of outgrew it. By the time our children were in high school, we knew we wanted more space than a quarter of an acre in a heavily regulated town. (Our neighbors called the police whenever our dogs barked for longer than a couple of minutes or our grass grew longer than the prescribed maximum of six inches. Really.) I couldn’t find a picture of this house from when we lived in it, but it looked a lot like this.

We moved to a wonderful old farmhouse on three acres, and we loved it. But my husband had been sick for years, and he unexpectedly died after we’d lived in that house for six years. I started to feel that I didn’t have much purpose rattling around in that house by myself, especially after our youngest child finally found a permanent job in DC and moved out. It was an answer to prayer when my younger daughter and her family asked me to move with them midway between DC and my beloved farmhouse. I’m winding up that move now. It’s taking much longer than it should; it’s hard for me to throw away years of memories and leave the last home that my husband and I had together, where we had intended to live out the rest of our lives. (Well, at least he got to!)

I live in a cozy four-room house behind the main house now. It’s really a perfect situation; I get to be with my daughter’s family most of the time, and I just love those five adorable kids! (See rosie-ablogformymom.blogspot.com—what’s not to love?) It doesn’t feel completely like home yet, which is to be expected, of course. After so many years of making a home with my husband, it’s odd to be back in the situation of being a dependent again. Plus I still own the farmhouse (anybody interested in buying a lovely peaceful place in the Shenandoah Valley?), so I don’t really have closure on that part of my life yet.

“Home” is a tough concept for me to get my mind around. I understand it intellectually, and I see how it works for most people. But for me, well, I’ll never quite understand that longing that Dorothy felt when she clicked her heels and murmured, “There’s no place like home.”

This post is part of the “Home to Me” blog hop, hosted by Julie Walsh of These Walls. During the two weeks from Friday, November 13 through Thanksgiving Day, more than a dozen bloggers will share about what the concept of “home” means to them. “Home” can been elusive or steady. It can be found in unexpected places. It is sought and cherished and mourned. It is wrapped up in the people we love. As we turn our minds and hearts toward home at the beginning of this holiday season, please visit the following blogs to explore where/what/who is “Home to Me.”

November 13 – Julie @ These Walls 

November 14 – Leslie @ Life in Every Limb 

November 15 – Ashley @ Narrative Heiress 

November 16 – Rita @ Open Window 

November 17 – Svenja, guest posting @ These Walls 

November 18 – Anna @ The Heart’s Overflow 

November 19 – Debbie @ Saints 365 

November 20 – Melissa @ Stories My Children Are Tired of Hearing 

November 21 – Amanda @ In Earthen Vessels 

November 22 – Daja and Kristina @ The Provision Room 

November 23 – Emily @ Raising Barnes 

November 24 – Annie @ Catholic Wife, Catholic Life 

November 25 – Nell @ Whole Parenting Family 

November 26 – Geena @ Love the Harringtons

What the Heck Kind of Punishment Is That?

I'm listening to Rosie being interviewed on a podcast: http://littlehousemothering.com/index.php/2015/07/19/stylin-motherhood/ She mentioned that the twins (Elizabeth and Mary Claire, currently about 2 1/2) recently were sent to their room as a punishment and started taking everything out of their dresser and closet, throwing it on the floor. As a punishment for that, their dresser was taken away. "You don't get a dresser any more? Who punishes their child like that?" Rosie asked, almost in despair.

Ohhhh, do I sympathize with that! Once I was so mad at my kids that I threatened them with a bath. Then I realized that that was not a punishment, but I had to keep my face in punishment mode. Fortunately, that threat worked. Whew! If it hadn't, I would have had to administer a bath as punishment, and that would have tainted baths forever!

In any case, once I took practically everything in Paddy and Peggy's room away. I had to make the punishment fit the crime, and the crime was—

<record needle screeches>

Well, let's back up. From 1984 to 1987, we lived in a two-bedroom apartment in what was then Merrifield Gardens. (It's now called Merrifield at Dunn Loring Station, but Metro didn't come there until 1986.) Patrick and Meg shared a room. When Rosie was born, she had a crib in the den, which had no door and was not counted as a bedroom.

One lovely summer weekend day in 1985, I was in my (our) bedroom talking to my mother on the phone, and it was going well. That was so unusual that I was willing to let the phone call go on longer than usual even though I heard an ominous silence in the background. Jonathan would take care of everything, right? Right . . . ? That silence was still going on when I got off the phone, and I rushed to the kids' room.

The kids had taken everything out of their closet and thrown it on the floor. They had taken everything off their beds. They had actually pushed a hole into the edge of the windowscreen and

they had thrown most of their toys and clothing out of the window.

You think that isn't a problem? We lived on the second floor.

They had thrown just about all their stuff outside. All that was left inside was a mattress and pillow for each child; those clearly didn't fit the hole in the screen. Jonathan and I had already noticed that stuff that was left outside (like Paddy's bike) managed to walk away.

So these two kids, aged almost-four and almost-two, were bored and found a novel way to entertain themselves. After they finished, they had the feeling that they had not done a good thing, but they didn't know how to get out of it. So they were just standing in their room staring at the lack of stuff and looking stunned.

It was hilarious! But a parent can never admit that an infraction of this sort is funny. So first I had to squash any hint of a smile, and then I had to speak sternly to the kids. They completely understood that they had done something bad; they were just wondering what the consequences would be. I was kind of wondering that, too. While I thought about it, I got their daddy to go and get all the stuff they had pretty much given to the neighborhood.

I finally decided that their punishment was to have nothing in their room for a week except what they had left in it. They were greatly relieved that nothing worse was happening to them. Gradually, I gave them back their bedding, toys, and clothes. It was summer, after all, and they weren't cold enough to need any blankets.

So I completely understand why Rosie took away her twins' chest of drawers. When they are old enough not to be tempted to do it again, maybe they will read this story. Then they can tease their Uncle Paddy and Aunt Sister about it!

That Hated Hyphen

“Oh, I never bother to remember the last names of my brothers’ girlfriends,” one of my future sisters-in-law airily informed me. “They just change them anyway.”

Well, I was darned if I was going to be the sixth Mrs. Kilmer. When relatives visited, it was already confusing enough directing incoming phone calls at the house—“Which Mr./Mrs. Kilmer do you want?” Often, the caller didn’t even realize that there were several of them. Besides, my brother’s wife and all my female friends who had gotten married had retained their maiden names; why shouldn’t I?

Jonathan had a different idea. He wanted us to have the same last name, just as his friend Jennifer Taylor-Ide and her husband did. In a huff, I asked him if he intended to change his name to a hyphenated name, too. “Of course,” he replied, looking at me as if I’d asked him if two plus two made four. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”

The Hunter-Kilmers before any of them changed their name

Even today, though, some people don’t understand that my last name is really, truly Hunter-Kilmer. Surely it’s Kilmer, right? I must not know my last name, I guess. Until Patrick was married, my stock answer was this: “No. It’s Hunter-Kilmer. It goes under the Hs. My husband’s last name is Hunter-Kilmer. The kids’ last name is Hunter-Kilmer. The dogs’ last name is Hunter-Kilmer.” That makes people laugh, and they put down my last name as I had originally told them.

Sometimes people want to know which was my maiden name. Just in case they are then going to assume that my last name is actually Kilmer, I tell them it doesn’t matter. I’ve had this last name since 1979. “But which name is it, really?” “Oh, I wouldn’t want to confuse you. My last name is really Hunter-Kilmer.” I smile to take the edge off.

Other people want to know what our children would do when they got married. What if they married somebody with a hyphen and became something like Hunter-Kilmer-von Lawick-Goodall? Jonathan and I figured that that was their problem. We didn’t care if the name of Hunter-Kilmer survived into the next generation, anyway.

Of course, our children thought that hyphenation was a terrible idea, and they all had plans to change their last name. Patrick took Hopkins, his wife’s last name. Rosie took Hill, her husband’s last name—which was actually more rebellious than what Patrick did, given our family.

The two single children are apparently too lazy to change their last names as they said they would. Timmy intends to take his wife’s name when he marries. “But what if she wants your last name?” “She can’t have it!”

Fortunately, the dogs don’t mind. Maybe they’ll be the last Hunter-Kilmers.

Happy May Day!

May Day isn't much of a thing in the US. It's a big thing in Europe, where it's really Labor Day with a Communist slant, as I see it. For Jonathan and me, it was something quite different—a little private anniversary.

At Oberlin, we used to have a special celebration for May Day. A group of students somehow got permission to climb into the Finney Chapel bell tower at the crack of dawn on May Day so that we could sing madrigals there. I think somebody rang bells, too.

I was usually game for odd things like this, so I sang up there in 1976, I think it was. Afterwards, there was some kind of strange breakfast tradition. Fueled by lots of carbs, endorphins, and the moral superiority of having gotten up before daybreak, I found myself full of good cheer but with nothing to do. Being a sophomore, which means "wise fool," I was still up for odd stuff. So of course I decided to make a long-distance call to somebody I'd never called before.

These days, of course, long-distance calls aren't even referred to as "long distance." You just make a call, and if it's in the US, it isn't a thing. Back then, there were no cell phones. Not only that, long-distance calls cost serious money for a student. (Go ahead, Patrick. Find a comparison chart for how much they cost. We'll be here when you come back.) I don't even remember how we made them, except I know that we didn't usually use pay phones; we had some kind of charging system and settled up later, maybe at the end of the month.

You can see that one didn't just call people up for a lark, not if it were long distance, and especially not if one didn't know the person fairly well. It was a shock to Jonathan, a junior at Portsmouth Abbey School, when somebody told him he had a call. From a girl. He picked up the phone in the hall at his dorm and heard my voice—and his knees buckled. I think all their energy went to what must have been a huge grin.

I don't remember what we talked about. We weren't really an item yet. It was after that fateful dinner at his parents' house (which I hope I'll write about later), but we weren't in love. Still, it was a delightful (though rather stilted) call, and we both remembered it fondly.

Every year on May 1, one of us would wake the other with a kiss and "Happy May Day!" Even though both of us loved our sleep, that was guaranteed to wake the other with a smile. It's a bittersweet memory.

Happy May Day, sweetheart. I love you forever.