Home vs Home

Jamie Clarke | He/him

CW: Death

As I write from my boyfriend's flat in Island Bay, I’m currently over 18,000 kilometres away from ‘home’. But, every night since lockdown, I go to sleep and have the same nightmare: I’m stuck at ‘home’ with no way of getting back home.

I know that sayings like “home is where the heart is” definitely belong on a suburban mum’s fridge freezer rather than in a student magazine. But, since moving across the globe away from my entire family, I’ve been able to learn what home really means to me. I went ‘home’ to see my family for a couple of months in summer. I spent most of it longing to come back to Wellington to be with my friends and boyfriend who feel so much more like family than most of my relatives ever have.

Most of my family are, well, pretty shit. There’s a handful of good ones: my Dad’s side of the family is small, but they are genuinely lovely (apart from my 16 year old, self-proclaimed libertarian cousin). My mum was great too, but she unfortunately died when I was 10. That left me with the dregs of her relatives. There’s my racist grandfather who abandoned my mum as he fled the country from loan sharks, and my chronic chain-smoker uncle who rants about the wrong side of politics on Facebook at 3am—to name a couple. However, those guys are nothing in comparison to the real antagonist of this story—my grandmother.

Is it selfish to abandon our older family members for our own health? I’m all my grandmother has left of my mum, and I know that just talking to her makes her day. There are days where all I can picture is her crying as I ignore her text message asking why I don’t communicate with her more. We are supposed to care for our grandparents after all. Taking them in when they are sick and preventing them from being lonely is just part of the deal after they’ve dedicated their life to your family. But what about when they haven’t held up their end of the bargain?

I’ve never felt at home around my grandmother; she’s always found a way to ruin my day. Some of my earliest memories are feeling sick as she would tell me that my mum’s cancer would probably come back. She was right—cancer killed my mum in 2010. But all these years later, I’m still not sure why she thought telling a 7-year-old that was a good idea. I wonder if she’s happy that she was right.

As much as I like to deny it, I’m connected to my grandmother. Whether I like it or not, we are tied together by my mother. Our shared experience, our shared memories, and our shared grief create an unshakable bond of simultaneous joy and sadness. While this should be a wonderful opportunity to be supportive of one another, in reality, it is a mess of guilt, confusion, and hurt.

Since my mum died, I’ve done what I can to move on with my life. I’ve finished school with good grades, moved away for university, and started completely afresh. I’ve made so many new friends, fallen in love, and am the happiest I’ve ever been. But, in the back of my head, there’s always been this hum of guilt, as my grandmother remains stuck in 2010, unable to shake the cloud of negativity caused by her loss. It’s not a hum, really. More like a shout. My grandmother reminds me of her pain constantly, informing me that I’ve left her behind and that all she wants is for me to care about her.

Distancing myself from her felt both liberating and constricting. I found myself feeling happier as I was away from a source of emotional anguish. Yet, I felt knots in my stomach when I would realise that she had not only lost her daughter but was now losing me, too.

There are days where I feel so anxious, angry, or just sad after my grandmother verbally attacks me over Whatsapp. I realise how thankful I am that I am thousands of miles away from her. Does that make me a bad person? I can’t quite bring myself to shut her out completely—it just feels too cruel. So, I message her maybe once a month. She sends me a paragraph filled with sadness and manipulation. I don’t respond. She messages me again and I respond like nothing happened—and the cycle repeats. I would be lying if this wasn’t the coward’s way out. I have pages and pages of notes on my phone filled with everything I want to say to her. I’ve spent hours with my thumb hovering over the send button, before hastily deleting anything that might even infer that she’s done something wrong, throwing my phone across the room, defeated.

I wish this was a story with a happier ending. I wish I could tell you that my grandmother and I talked everything through and our relationship is stronger than ever, or that I finally realised enough was enough and stopped talking to her entirely. But, family has never been that simple. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel at home with my family, or if I’ll ever really know how to deal with my grandmother. I don’t think I’ll ever get to look forward to going to a family dinner. But, what I do know is that I feel at home here, with my new family, who make me feel happy rather than hurt. While I might not be able to shake the connection I have to my grandmother, I have been able to form new connections with a new family, in a place I can truly call home.