Home Sweet Home

Two years and a day ago my husband and I closed on our first home together. It was four days before our wedding, and everywhere I went the atmosphere around me twirled with busy excitement. If there was a time in my life that I was walking on clouds, that was it. My 2004 ford escape was packed constantly over those days with suitcases of stuff from my single girl’s room at my parent’s house, the things from my fiancé’s Army barracks, and all the many boxes of new appliances from our wedding registry – all the things that would become ours.

My parents and family and family friends helped us move in, bit by bit over those days. A free full-size bed. A used dining room table. A couch from Facebook marketplace. New plates stacked in ceramic sequence in the kitchen cupboard. It all came together in a wonderfully ordinary hodgepodge of him and I. Some new, some used. Nothing you’d see on a magazine, but completely him and I. And that is all that mattered to me. Even with my Pinterest board of impeccably aesthetic homes that screamed summer nights on the warmly lit patio with a glass of wine, and matching bathroom robes hanging by the clawfoot tub…I desired nothing more than what we had.

When we moved in after our wedding day, it was a lovely combination of slightly awkward and entirely right. It was a breath of fresh air, an exhale of finally, fully together at last. Even after the few nights he had stayed the night with me at my parent’s house while we were dating – how offkey for two church kids – there was something new about actually living together. We had spent so much time with one another, but this was new territory. There was something more about sharing the bathroom and discussing what to have for dinner and realizing that a full-size bed should not be called that when two people have to sleep in it. The togetherness was new and the home itself was new. It took longer than expected to become comfortable with both. It took over a year to begin feeling like this home was my home. When we visited my parent’s house, there was part of me that still wanted to wake up there. I had a closeness with the creaky wooden stairs, the light that poured in the kitchen window in the morning, and the big bathtub of the 1970s.

Two years later, the slightly awkward part has floated away with the early butterflies of the honeymoon stage of marriage. What has taken its place is a familiarity of home, a deep comfort of walking through the doors, and a peace in the morning when I wake up to light touching the horizon that I can see from the upstairs living room. This is the place my husband and I began our lives together and habituated our lives as one. This is the place we’ve ran up the stairs over and over with magnet bodies pulling at each other as we kissed our way into bed. This is the place we brought our baby home, with the basinet by our bedside (our king bed because our first free full-sized bed was way too full of the two of us, sleeping pressed up against one another in forced sweaty company, rather than sweet and cuddly). I know now what the kitchen looks like through all hours of the night’s darkness, with the warm glow of the oven light on as I warmed bottle after bottle, with tired eyes, sagging body, and anxious mind. My husband or the house never judged me in those hours or other difficult times, and when you’ve been seen in many hard moments, it’s a short road to comfortability. The bathroom floor has held me as I’ve cried, the living room couch has caught our tears as we laugh until our cheeks hurt, the doorknob has welcomed me home with a reassuring handhold as I twist it open to the scent of my entry way and my family.

I can reflect on the joy of those days we were moving in with a sacredness that I will always hold in my heart. I can reflect on the minor awkwardness and newness of early married life and life in this home with a small laugh and admiration of how far we’ve come. And I can be present in the now, two years later, soaking up the current moments that I realize become past memories so quick. Soon I will look back at the nursery that quickly will become a bedroom to two sisters, laughing and fighting and calling me by my new name, mommy, when they have a scary dream. I will remember the view from the baby monitor of my husband cradling our baby with her bottle in the rocker, kissing her soft baby hair. I know how suddenly her hair will grow, that the kisses will be turned away in teenage angst before we know it. I will soak up in sponge-like behavior the scents and sights and hard days and perfect days.

I’m thankful for these walls that create the space for the now, for the memories we’ve created and the memories that are yet to happen. I’m thankful for the last two years and how this house has become my home, how my family has become my home. Comfortable. Familiar. Easy in the hard. Joy in the small.