The nightmares began weeks after we moved into Our House: Through the kitchen’s French doors, I’d see that the gate to the backyard was wide open, the wood splintered and the lock shattered.
In another, when I went to pee in the middle of the night, I’d catch a glimpse of a figure in the backyard. I’d peer through the bathroom window to see a masked man standing in the middle of the lawn.
Yet another: My basement office window would be shattered—nothing taken, just the locks askew and useless.
I spoke with my therapist about these things. She asked if I was afraid of my home being taken away from me.
I wanted to laugh. I’d finally gotten a home that I knew was mine. My husband was a partner at the largest law firm in the world. We would pay off the mortgage in ten years.
“I have nothing to be afraid of,” I said, drowning out the quaking in my belly.
***
My first home was a duplex in Camden, New Jersey that my mother bought when she was just 23 years old, five years before I was born. Mommy lived in the bottom unit and rented out the top unit to family and friends, charging them enough rent to cover the whole mortgage—brilliance that astounds me to this day.
The duplex is where my mom brought me home from the hospital. We lived there until I was only two years old, so I have no memory of my first home. My mother sold it to move to Rhode Island and marry my father, and we lived there for only a year and some change before moving to North Carolina. Their marriage lasted officially for 10 years, but unofficially for five, unraveling and falling completely apart after we moved down south.
Perhaps my mother giving up my first home rattled me in some deep, subconscious way, or maybe it was that she gave it up for my father, who later turned emotionally abusive, but I found myself unsettled in every place I lived in—nineteen homes total, fourteen during childhood alone—unable to truly get comfortable anywhere. It was as if I had acquired the habit of sitting one inch above a chair, waiting for the seat to get swept out from under me, but refusing to be left on the floor.
***
From the beginning, Our House drew me in, with its bright red door contrasting against the deep blue exterior—my favorite colors.
Inside, as I wandered from room to room, I asked myself, Is this Our House?
Our real estate agent showed us around, and I felt both in awe and at peace. The open floor plan exposed the white kitchen, and the uncovered windows made it seem like the entry floor was glowing. Upstairs, the four bedrooms were perfect in their own way. I could see us having a child who slept in a crib in the room across from the main bedroom. The main was small, but the attached bathroom featured a soaking tub and a spa-like shower that I instantly dreamed of luxuriating in. The basement featured two more bedrooms and a living room. I could see my office there, my desk in front of the window well.
I think it might be Our House, I told myself.
I felt more certain that it was Our House when we stepped into the huge backyard. The whole plot was about a quarter acre, bonkers for any home in Washington, DC’s city limits. A white wooden fence trimmed the yard, setting boundaries while also allowing us to see our surroundings. I was exhausted of living so close to other people in a condo building, but I still wanted to feel like I was a part of a community.
The family of deer resting in the yard sold me. A buck, a doe, and a fawn sat under a tree, seeking respite from the early summer heat. The three of them looked at the three of us and remained unbothered, gnawing on grass.
In this deer family, I saw my family.
My spouse, Rustin, and I had not yet had a child. By the time we were looking at Our House, we’d been trying to conceive for over a year and a half. I’ve never been the type of woman who saw motherhood as her ultimate goal, but I wanted to have a family of my own as much as I wanted a home of my own.
Admiring the deer family, I said, Yes, this is Our House. This is Our Home.
***
My parents separated for the first time when I was eight. My mother and I moved in with her cousin about a mile away from my father and the cramped little blue house we’d shared with him and his four other children from his first marriage. Even though it wasn’t very far in terms of distance, the cousin’s neighborhood seemed like a new world: the homes larger and with more trees, in the front yards as well as the backs. My mom’s cousins’ kids were grown, so the house always felt as quiet as it was empty. I loved how peaceful it was, so vastly different from the sound of my father bellowing; I could hear myself think. When my mother decided that we would move back in with my father and his kids, I wasn’t disappointed, just confused—I thought she’d loved the peace more than him, too.
While my parents were separated, my father lived in a house on Main Street, across the bridge. The Main Street house was bigger, but older, with high ceilings, too many doors, and carpet in the bathroom in addition to the living and bed rooms. When we moved back in, I took to vacuuming every Saturday, sprinkling Love My Carpet and praying that the ever-lingering funk would disappear. It never did. I avoided sitting on the floor because the carpet—musty, brown, and matted—seemed to never get clean.
I was nine years old and shared a room with my teenaged half-sisters, who I referred to as “Daddy’s girls.” The girls and I had the same father, but they had spent most of their childhoods with their mother, who made sure they hated me because I existed. None of them ever tried to physically hurt me, but I felt sliced by their glares, the times they ignored me when I was in the same room, and when they ate candy right in front of my face without offering me any.
Our brother Al was my savior. About ten years older than me, he was more mature and loved me with a seemingly innate understanding that I had no say in being born. At the little blue house, Al and I watched The Three Stooges together, laughing at the nonsense on TV to remove ourselves from the chaos of our father’s ever-changing moods. But by the time Mom and I moved into the house on Main Street, Al was 19, an adult. An adult who got tired of Dad’s continued tyrannical behavior and who moved out one day without saying goodbye.
I was hurt by his leaving, but I got over it quickly when I was allowed to move into his room, leaving the girls to share their space without me feeling unwelcome. It was the first time I had my own room, and I was thrilled. Mommy bought me my own TV/VCR set, so I could watch Family Matters on Friday nights or movies from the video rental store across the street.
But the thrill didn’t last. One night, my parents had an explosive argument, and my father screamed at my mother, “THIS IS MY HOUSE! THIS IS MY HOUSE! THIS IS MY HOUSE!” After that, my mother moved into my room, sleeping on the bottom bunk while I slept on the top.
My mother loved my father. I overheard her tell a friend that she needed a sign that she should leave him, as if his coldness, narcissism, and nasty attitude weren’t enough. So, God showed her a vision.
In it, a tsunami collected above my father’s house, defying gravity as it towered, growing and growing and growing, seemingly waiting. Terrified, my mom grabbed me, and we ran out of the house, just in time. The tsunami pounded the house, decimating it completely, leaving behind only the concrete steps leading to the street.
In real life, we moved out of the house months later and never lived with my father again.
Some fifteen years later, I drove by that house, and sure enough, it was no longer standing. It had not been decimated by water, but by fire, and only the concrete steps remained. My father and sisters had moved long before the fire, but I couldn’t help but think my mother’s vision had still played out. I wondered if there was anything that could have been done to keep it standing.
***
Rustin and I moved into Our House in July 2020—that wild pandemic summer. We were both beyond excited: finally, a whole house instead of a condo. Rustin had grown up outside of Baltimore and lived in the same house since he was two years old. All four of his older brothers had bought homes of their own by the time we moved into Our House, and he said it was as if he was finally a part of his own family after he’d done this thing that everybody else had done a long time earlier.
To make Our House our own, we hired an interior designer to help us design the entry floor. We painted the kitchen blue and gray, our alma mater’s colors, and chose furniture both comfortable and stylish, preppy and coastal—outward expressions of our inner worlds: calm, cool, aspiring for greatness.
It was as if we’d finally stepped into our true selves. I could finally breathe easy, finally sit on that chair because I’d designed my life just so.
***
Once my mother left my father for good when I was nine, she and I bounced around houses for years, living with family members or friends. We moved mostly for practical reasons, my mother wanting to save money until she could afford her own place, but also due to circumstances beyond our control. Like, once, another of my mother’s cousins decided to foster a child, so we had to move out of the room she wanted to use. After four moves in as many years, I felt unmoored.
“We move so much, I feel like an outlaw,” I told my aunt when I was eleven.
All the moving was taking its toll on me. I felt tempted to call us “homeless,” but I knew not to do that. I was grateful to have a place to live. But as we drove around town on errands or going to school or to church, I found myself longing for a real home.
We lived in Salisbury, North Carolina, a small town with a rich history. A country club sits across from the City Park near downtown, and within just a stone’s throw of the club sat some of the nicest houses in the city. I felt overwhelmed just looking at them, two- or three-story houses, and I once asked my mother how big they were.
“Probably 3,000 square feet,” she said.
“How big is our house?” I asked, referring to whatever friend or relative’s house we were sharing at the time.
“Maybe 1,000,” she said.
I didn’t feel deflated, but it put everything in perspective.
“These are big, beautiful homes,” Mommy continued. “But you notice no one is ever there.”
It was nighttime, and I did notice that few lights appeared to be on inside.
“It takes a lot of money to heat a house like that, and the light bill is probably really high, too, so those people have to work a lot to afford it,” she said.
I wish I could say that I knew my mother was either jealous or trying to make me feel better, but I can’t. Even as a child I took away from that conversation that living in a big, beautiful home was, somehow, wrong. It meant working and not enjoying. It meant striving for wealth, which was against God’s will. It meant that I could never be comfortable, that home would always be out of reach.
***
Rustin and I agreed that we didn’t need to rush to decorate the rest of the house. Three-and-a-half months after we moved in, on Halloween, I learned I was pregnant.
We’d spent nearly two years trying to conceive, and I had had a couple of early miscarriages along the way. When the test read positive, I didn’t want to get my hopes up if they would just be dashed again. But this time was different.
Our son Desmond was born almost a year to the day after we moved into Our House. As I looked at this baby boy with big eyes like mine, I wondered what my mother thought about when she brought me home to the duplex. Did she think she would raise me there? As I held my son to my chest and smelled that sweet baby smell on him, I couldn’t fathom raising him anywhere but Our House.
We’d had a virtual baby shower, and our friends sent us gifts we used to furnish Desmond’s room upstairs, across from ours. Rustin and I arranged and rearranged the furniture in his room. I wanted it to be perfect; I didn’t believe in feng shui, but I wanted there to be peace, a seamlessness and ease as he entered his room. I wanted him to know that it was his; that it would always be his.
***
After the duplex, my mother didn’t buy her next piece of property until she was forty-three, a full twenty years later. This time, it was a 1,000-square foot single-family home in North Carolina, in a town made famous for its now-defunct textile mill.
By then, I was a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore who wasn’t happy about switching schools so close to graduating. But the future was my focus: in just over two years, I would go to college and start my own life. I concluded that there was no need to make this my home if I was just going to leave. I avoided putting posters on the wall, and even decided not to put up curtains, letting the roller shade suffice. My mother installed curtains eventually, but only after I’d gone to college. I called it “my mother’s house,” not “my house,” like a normal kid. Because it wasn’t my home.
I decided that my home was somewhere else, somewhere ideally in Washington, DC, because I’d gone on a school trip there and fallen in love with the city. It was bad enough that I didn’t feel I had a hometown—I was born in Camden, New Jersey, a gritty place where nerdy kids like me didn’t belong, and I’d spent my childhood in Salisbury, North Carolina, a quiet place where city kids like me didn’t belong—I didn’t have a home home, either. But I wanted one. I wanted to “sit my ass down somewhere,” as the old folks said, and never get up again. I wanted a mortgage. I wanted a space that could never be taken away from me.
***
Shortly after Desmond was born, cracks appeared in the walls of Our House. Lines etched their way in curves along the wall of the master bathroom. A corner of the attic seemed to be caving in. The seam of the bulkhead over the kitchen sink zipped slightly open.
My nightmares returned: In one, that bulkhead seam gave way while I was luxuriating in the bathtub, falling into the kitchen, a floor below.
In another, the locks of another basement window were picked, and the window merely cracked open.
In yet another: I came downstairs, and the front door had been left wide open, wind blowing leaves onto the living room floor.
We called a repairperson, a kindly old British man who wandered around the inside and outside of the house, tinkering with the bricks and measuring here and there. Six hours later, he reported that the developer had not repaired the house’s foundation. As a result, Our House had sunk an inch in one year.
The repairman quoted us prices to fix it: $100,000 to lift it back in place, a little less than half that to keep it where it had shifted.
“What happens if we don’t do anything?” I asked.
The kindly old man only shook his head.
***
The minute I moved into my first apartment out of college in downtown DC, I could no longer afford it. Since moving would have required a first month’s rent and a security deposit, I couldn’t afford to leave it, either. My living situation provided me with the most confounding set of emotions: anxiety and relief. I could not save a dime, but it was also the closest I had ever come to feeling at home.
It was a studio, with a long hallway that led to the efficiency space. I asked my former college roommate to help me design it. We moved the bed by the window to create a “bedroom” space, with my desk at the foot of the bed. For the “living room,” I bought two small IKEA armchairs and a coffee table, and put my laptop on my dresser to act as the TV. A pub table and two stools along with a microwave cart created my “dining room.”
My favorite season was winter. I turned on the heat and put my face close to the radiator, feeling the warmth in my nose, just because I could. I made popcorn and hot chocolate and sat in bed, watching Netflix DVDs on my laptop. I put on fuzzy socks and slid around the linoleum in the hallway. I felt cozy. I felt free. I felt safe.
I lived in my apartment for six years, unheard of for my friend group, who switched apartments every year or two, or moved around the country or world for short-term work assignments. For the first time in my life, I had stability. I had given myself the thing I’d wanted so badly, even though it still felt precarious. My rent increased every year, and every year, it got less affordable, but I still stayed because I couldn’t afford to move, and that simmering anxiety grew. I knew that I would have to leave someday, and I felt afraid that I would be forced to, because of money. Instead, marriage booted me out.
Rustin and I didn’t live together before we got married because even love couldn’t keep me from sharing my space until I had to. But I gladly let him move into my apartment after our wedding. Now that we were officially committed to each other, it didn’t feel like an intrusion so much as an invitation to begin to build a life together. My home was now our home.
Rustin was due to move to New York City to start his first law firm job that fall, while I stayed in DC to finish grad school, so we only spent five months together as a married couple in my studio. Then, for seven months after that, we were long-distance married, traveling between DC and NYC to see each other every two weeks.
The arrangement wasn’t ideal, but it let me hold onto my home longer. I’d been worried about our marriage going horribly wrong and turning out like my parents. So, I wanted to keep as much stability as I could for as long as I could before anything could go wrong. The fear that instability lurked just around the corner, that at any moment I would have to leave, that I wouldn’t have anywhere to go, followed me everywhere.
***
We took out a five-figure loan to repair the foundation of Our House and braced ourselves for impact. For two weeks, our basement was a massive crater that I could only think went to the center of the earth. It rained one day during the contracting, and mud caked the exterior of the house, completely clouding my office window. I stayed out of the house all day to avoid a headache from the jackhammering. Even though the wreckage was only in the basement, my whole house felt foreign to me, like seeing a loved one stricken with illness. Once the work was done, the company didn’t fix any of the disarray they’d created—clean-up wasn’t a part of the contract. So the walls of our basement stayed ripped out and the dirt beneath the floorboards remained exposed for months because we couldn’t afford to do any more work.
Rustin had since left his job for a partner role at a much smaller firm, where his salary had been cut in half, but the promise of larger bonuses loomed. I wanted him to be happy in his work, but contentment, much less mirth, seemed to be farther and farther out of reach for my usually jovial spouse. I recognized the symptoms of depression before they set in, but I focused on Desmond and my work, things I had some control over.
***
At the end of grad school, I said a long goodbye to my studio apartment. I sold the IKEA furniture to people on Craigslist, including a dad who wanted the pub table for his man cave. I felt sad, but also excited, looking forward to my new life with Rustin in New York City.
Our apartment was a typical New York City apartment, with roaches and some winter days with no heat. We moved Rustin in just before Hurricane Sandy, and he spent the first week washing up at the kitchen sink because there was no hot water.
For those not from New York, the city can be a tough place to live. It is hard to walk down the street without making bodily contact with someone, and there is a constant stream of sound. I walked not with my head held high, but looking down, to avoid steeping in feces—be it dog or human, I could never tell.
I wanted our apartment to be an oasis, so I got blackout curtains for the bedroom to block the street light pouring in through our windows. I put hooks on the wall to hold our reusable grocery bags so we’d remember them on the way out to the store. I arranged our cabinets so that the soup cans would always be in the front in winter, so we could easily get warmth and comfort.
But as much as I tried, it was never home. Rustin often worked 20-hour days in his early years as an associate, coming home from the office in a company-paid black car at two a.m. As a freshly minted MBA graduate who had yet to find a job, I was grateful that he worked so hard to provide for us, but I was also lonely. We were supposed to be building this life together, and I was doing it by myself.
When I started working at an investment firm, things didn’t get any better; we just had more money to help us make it through. We were both burned out, him from working so hard and not seeing the sun most days, and me from feeling unwelcome at work as a Black woman in finance. So we decided to move back to DC, the city we both called home.
We bought a condo in a hip, gentrifying neighborhood whose bars and restaurants we thought we would frequent. We didn’t account for the fact that we’d gotten less interested in going out because we were older, and we didn’t know that the COVID-19 pandemic would shut everything down after a couple of years, anyway. During lockdown, we attempted to work while our upstairs neighbors seemingly stomped around all day. Our final straw was seeing a dead body at the bus stop not even 50 feet from our bedroom window. I had been used to being uncomfortable, but this was too much. So, we began the search for Our House.
***
Rustin and I were so happy to be new homeowners and new parents, but the exhaustion of both the foundation repair and sleepless nights taking care of an infant were like nothing either of us had experienced. I coped via therapy, a good sense of humor, and an appreciation for absurdity, but Rustin took a turn, a mild depressive episode turning into a much longer, deeper, darker one.
On our ten-year anniversary, Rustin attempted suicide, then decided not to go through with it. I didn’t learn about it until the next day, when his therapist reported it to me after Rustin had told him. I drove Rustin to the hospital, where the ER nurse asked him, “Do you want to live?” He replied, “Sometimes.” With that, she said that they had a bed for him.
I went to see him every day of the five days he spent there, finding someone to take care of Desmond since COVID restrictions didn’t allow me to bring a baby to the hospital. Rustin and I talked about Desmond, movies he watched on Netflix with the other patients, the Psalms I was reading that sounded like journal entries. I wondered if he’d ever be able to be a partner to me again.
While Rustin was away, my therapist asked me a question I’d been afraid to ask myself, “What are you afraid of?”
“Abandonment,” I said, before she even got the whole question out.
From the moment I moved into Our House, that quiet, simmering anxiety I experienced in my studio apartment returned. I hadn’t realized that it was a fear of abandonment, a fear of loss of safety, not just that I’d lose everything I’d wanted and that what I had worked for would all be taken away.
Rustin’s hospitalization put all of my feelings of safety and security in jeopardy. I feared that we had become those people my mother warned me about, the ones with the big, beautiful homes in Salisbury, with lives wholly untenable. Only our issue wasn’t paying utilities, but managing a life that had maybe been too aspirational to begin with.
I had no way of knowing what would happen. I could only do what I could. In spite of the fear, I had to admit: I’d held everything together. I’d made sure Rustin and Desmond ate, bathed, slept, got sunlight and fresh air, and I had kept them from falling into holes in the basement. I was making light of it only because the reality rattled me—I had given birth to new life and kept my husband alive. Now, I had a choice—to believe in the possibility of loss or to believe in the truth of recovery.
I needed to burrow deeper in: make it more of a home for Rustin to return to, for me to find shelter in, and for Desmond to flourish in. I would start with the practical.
***
That summer, just before Desmond’s first birthday, we opened credit cards in order to hire contractors to make all of the remaining cosmetic repairs to the basement. A week or so later, they were done. Our House looked as if nothing had ever happened.
After that, I spent my afternoons at HomeGoods or IKEA buying everything I needed for my home office, in the basement of Our House. I hired guys on TaskRabbit to assemble furniture and to install floating shelves and a clear white board on the walls. I bought art online and carefully hung the paintings myself. I even went to my university and purchased frames for my diplomas, fifteen and nine years after my undergrad and MBA graduations.
I rearranged the furniture in Desmond’s room to make it more open and leave space for him to play when he got older. I frosted the window in the hall bathroom. I installed shelves in our bedroom closet.
I went to Blinds To Go and ordered roller shades for the windows to replace the temporary paper shades we’d put up in a pinch. A month later, after they were finally installed, I could not stop smiling.
“I live here!” I said out loud to no one, gleefully. “This is my house!”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I clapped my hands over my lips. They were the exact same ones my father had bellowed at my mother all those years earlier. Words that I heard through the walls of a house with too many doors, with carpet that never seemed to get clean, a place I knew was not my home long before my father made it explicit. And here I was, saying the same words because I had made them true for myself.
I’d spent my whole life feeling afraid of being abandoned, but I had already been abandoned by my father. I’d also done my fair share of abandoning, going from house to house, with only memories left in my wake. There was no reason to be afraid of what was, but plenty of opportunity to create a new path, one of consistent harmony with my surroundings and confidence that I get to decide who I am, no matter where that might be.
This feeling of contentment and satisfaction was like nothing I’d ever felt. Literally, it felt unfamiliar, totally new to me. I wondered what this feeling in particular was called, and I realized it was resolution. There was nothing more to do in Our House to make it Our Home.
I’d forgotten that I’d ordered another small organizing shelf. When it arrived, I unboxed it and put it together. I walked it to the pantry, trying to remember where I had planned to put it. Feeling its weight in my hands, I realized that I didn’t need it. I knew that I was done; I was comfortable. I took it downstairs and set it in the basement storage closet. I turned off the closet light and shut the double doors, satisfied.
