Leaving the House My Mother Grew Up In
Leaving the House My Mother Grew Up In
Gracie McBride
My grandmother still lives in The House My Mother Grew Up In. I have never spent an extended amount of time there, but going to visit my grandmother feels like going home to a place I’ve never lived.
Land holds memory. When I step in The House My Mother Grew Up In, I become all the versions of myself that have entered it before: I’m a seven-year-old playing with an old doll house in the living room, a twelve-year-old riding a bike through an obstacle course we made in the driveway, and a twenty-two-year-old learning how to exist in a house without one of the people who made it feel like home.
The House My Mother Grew Up In is a small one-story building in North-East Tennessee with a finished, if now dusty, basement I haven’t been in in years. My grandparents built it themselves the year before my mother, the eldest child, was born and have expanded and made additions to it during the five decades and change they’ve lived there.
As he got older, my grandfather got less stable on his feet, and he started to stumble more and even fell a few times. My grandmother, who measures five foot one on a good day, was unable to help, and my uncle wasn’t always around to assist him to his feet. So, they decided it was time for my grandfather to move out of The House My Mother Grew Up In and into a place where he would have more help.
The first time I visited The House My Mother Grew Up In after my grandfather died two years ago was not as strange as I had supposed it would be. Perhaps this was because he had left the home he built several years before he passed. My family stayed in The House My Mother Grew Up In the weekend of the funeral, just like we do every time we visit. His books fill the shelf. His pictures hang on the walls: both ones he took and paintings and various art pieces he bought on travels. There are too many to fit so the extras are stacked in the corner. His suits and ties even still hang in the closet collecting dust and hair from the cats he only lived with for maybe a year. He left, but the ties stayed. Why would you need a silk tie you picked up on a trip to Italy when you’re confined to a retirement center? I don’t think my dad bought any ties when we went to Italy in 2019, but he took one of my grandfather’s ties from the closet last time we were there.
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As my grandmother slowly prepares to move herself to live with my aunt two hours away, I’ve found myself clinging onto The House My Mother Grew Up In more than ever. At first, I couldn’t figure out why I cared so deeply about it—I just knew I did. But I also knew that I was not alone in wanting to hang on to my homeland, even one I’ve never lived in.
This sense of perpetually seeking the homeland led me to Homer’s Odyssey. On his way back from the Trojan War, Odysseus gets stranded on the island Ogygia, where the goddess Calypso lives. Homer describes the island as verdant: “Around the cave / a luscious forest flourished: alder, poplar, / and scented cypress” (5.63-5). It’s like a paradise, a place no one would ever want to leave. But Odysseus spends his days staring out to sea, wishing to go home: “His eyes were always / tearful; he wept sweet life away, in longing / to go back home, since [Calypso] no longer pleased him” (5.149-51).
Calypso, as an immortal goddess, can’t comprehend the finiteness of time that propels Odysseus’ to return to Ithaca. She tells him, “I know my body is better than hers is. I am taller too. / Mortals can never rival the immortals in beauty” (5.211-12). If the decision was strictly about material pleasure, then it doesn’t make sense for Odysseus to leave. He has everything he could want on Ogygia, plus a beautiful goddess to keep him company.
But Odysseus tells Calypso, “I know my modest wife / Penelope could never match your beauty. / She is a human; you are deathless, ageless. / But even so, I want to go back home, / and every day I hope that day will come” (5.214-18). This is not about measurable beauty: it’s about immeasurable longing. The Greek concept of nostos refers to a return home. It’s where the English word “nostalgia” comes from. Odysseus longs for his home and reminisces on the life he had there, even while surrounded by all the pleasures he could imagine.
Odysseus has a very practical reason to return to Ithaca: his wife and son are still there, and if he doesn’t go back his palace will be ransacked by Penelope’s unwanted suitors and his family line destroyed. But I don’t have a reason. I’m a hypocrite here telling you that I want everyone to stay exactly as they were, while meanwhile I’m the one who left the Georgia suburbs four years ago to go to college in New York City and have no current plans of returning. No one wants to live in the house and I don’t either, I just want to know that it exists for me to go back to: something stable for the times when my life feels anything but. There is no real need for us to hang onto the House My Mother Grew Up In. It seems now like its only purpose is collecting dust and memories.
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I always think I like nostalgia until I remember what it really is: nostalgia is not reality. Nostalgia, as I have experienced it and will use it here, is the recollection of a feeling of a time and place that I want to go back to, but not the lived experience of it.
The House My Mother Grew Up In is drenched in nostalgia. It causes me to long for a time when our schedules were simpler, and everyone lived at home, and we would fry beignets in the morning and have cousin sleepovers at night. Nostalgia is a kind of memory, but it’s often a false one. It makes me forget the bad times and only remember the good ones. And it makes me believe that I can go back to that feeling I remember—but I can’t. And holding onto The House My Mother Grew Up In doesn’t make it any more possible for me to go back to the way things were either.
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As I continued to search for the words to put to this deep desire, I turned to Shakespeare’s King Lear, where Lear’s love for his daughter Cordelia is wrapped up in her inheritance; in the physical land she will receive from him. The land binds them to each other and Cordelia recognizes this, telling her father that “I love your Majesty / according to my bond, no more nor less” (1.1.101-2). Her older sisters proclaim their love for their father with eloquent turns of phrase and flatter him in front of all the dukes in order to receive a greater inheritance.
But Cordelia knows the proper place of her duty to her father and does not exceed it.
Cordelia asks Lear “why have my sisters husbands if they say / they love you all?” (1.1.109-110). She is unmarried and probably suspects that Lear plans to use this kingdom-dividing love contest as an excuse to choose Cordelia’s husband for her. But while this seems cold, Cordelia actually loves her father more authentically than her sisters do, who spoke with flowery language but only care about their inheritance, not the well-being of their father.
With this, Lear’s match-making plan backfires causing him to “disclaim all my paternal care, / propinquity, and property of blood, / and as a stranger to my heart and me / hold thee from this forever” (1.1.125-8). Propinquity has to do with closeness: both physical and emotional. When Lear banishes Cordelia from the physical land, he banishes her from emotional proximity as well. To Lear, they are the same: you will be emotionally close to those who are physically near you and physically near to those who are emotionally close to you. Cordelia will now be as a stranger to him, not a daughter. She has no claim to her “property of blood,” her inheritance that acts as a family legacy, anymore.
It’s hard for me to imagine such a harsh sentence. Modern technology allows me to remain emotionally close to those I no longer live near, like my parents who I moved away from to go to college, and those I only ever visited occasionally, like my grandparents. But I still feel a certain duty to the physical land of my family while enjoying my modern transience.
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It is highly unlikely that The House My Mother Grew Up In will stay in the family when my grandmother moves. And this isn’t just a house she bought and has lived in for a few years, or even a decade or two. No, this is land she purchased with my grandfather for their new family. This is a house she saw the blueprints for and expanded as she saw fit. These are trees she has watched grow for half a century. If my family has made an imprint on any physical land, it would be the land of The House My Mother Grew Up In.
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I don’t want to be like Goneril and Regan, faking devotion for the purpose of inheriting their family’s land. After all, the land isn’t what’s ultimately important, the people in it are. It was out of her love for her father that Cordelia stood up to him, just as it was out of a love for his ancestors that Odysseus wanted to preserve his homeland and a love for his descendants that drove him to return and continue his family line in the place they had always been.
By holding onto The House My Mother Grew Up In, I participate in the line of all the inhabitants that came before me and all that will come after. I become my mother listening to my sister Julia and my Granny singing “Little Miss Muffet” outside my bedroom door, which is how the childhood dog got her name. I become my grandfather hanging paintings and listening to music, never content without art and beauty around me. I become my grandmother, making the same cup of coffee and looking out the same window every morning for the past fifty years. I can’t walk through the front door without grappling with my family’s history.
So maybe it’s for that reason that we have to move on. I have a tendency to want to cling too tightly to the past; to make everything stay exactly the same as it always was. But life doesn’t work that way. I know that there’s a middle way, but I don’t know if The House My Mother Grew Up In has a place in it.
Odysseus went back home to take care of his wife and son. Cordelia went home to save her father’s kingdom from attack. One was successful, the other was not. But even if I am also motivated by love for my family and dedication to my homeland, I do not have to follow in their footsteps.
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I call it The House My Mother Grew Up In. And my family refers to it as Grandmommy’s House, as she’s the one who lives there now. But if I’m really honest with myself, I don’t want to leave because it’s really Grandaddy’s House, and there’s a part of me that believes that he can’t really be gone forever if the house is still there: if his ties still hang in the closet and his pictures still hang on the walls.
I wonder when my grandfather last set foot in The House My Mother Grew Up In? He wouldn’t have known it was the last time. After he moved to the first retirement home, we still took him back occasionally for special events: Christmas or Thanksgiving. I know it was hard for him to leave. He didn’t want to go, but it wasn’t exactly feasible for him to stay either. If it’s so hard for me to even think about getting rid of the house I only visit two to three times a year, how much more difficult must it have been for him to leave the place he raised his daughters in and the place he watched his grandchildren grow?
There’s no rush to get out of The House My Mother Grew Up In, and there are still so many things to go through. My sister and I started a box of things we might like to keep. I browsed through my grandfather’s bookshelves and ended up choosing a collection of art history books. My dad took a tie from the closet. They haven’t been needed in years.
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I’ve learned that though nostalgia can be dangerous, remembering is good. Throughout the Old Testament the Israelites use rocks of remembrance—or an “ebenezer” as Samuel called his, saying “‘till now the Lord has helped us” (1 Sam. 7:12)—as a physical reminder of the goodness of God. The House My Mother Grew Up In is that physical manifestation of the story of my family and God’s grace to us.
So one day I will take a painting my grandfather loved and a photo that he took from The House My Mother Grew Up In and drive away for the last time. Unlike my grandfather, I’ll know it’s the last and be able to say goodbye to the physical foundation that held my family’s history for the last half a century. But then I’ll go and I’ll hang that painting that he loved and that photo that he took in my own house. Because while there is a literal foundation to a small one-story building in North East Tennessee, that’s not the real foundation of my family. The stories that we pass on to each other are. The land might hold memory, but I do too.
Gracie McBride
Writer & Theatre Administrator
Photography by Paul Okrema