Room with a View…

If I could be anywhere in the world right now, I would choose to be home.  Home is where the heart is.  Home is where I am at my most comfortable.  Home is where I can be myself.  Home is definitely not wherever I leave my hat!  I am a home bird.

You may think that ‘home’ for me would be where I currently dwell, but this is not the case.  I still feel that my real home is the house  I grew up in.  My parents still live in that house and I am most grateful for that.  It holds so many memories – good and bad.  It is the place where I went from child to teenager to adult – my transformation from caterpillar to butterfly.

It is a very simple three bed council house.  My parents never could afford to buy even till this day.  We lived simply and always just had enough to get by, which in those days was enough.  We learnt about being grateful for what we had and never wished for more.

My sisters and i had a few toys each but we were happy making up our own games, playing outside and making stuff out of boxes!  We didn’t watch much Tv and never had such things as computer games – we couldn’t afford them.  We read books, wrote stories and used our imaginations!

My Mum worked as a cleaning lady in a local school and my Dad was a landscape gardener, so our house was always clean and our garden immaculate.  We were bought up with a strong work ethic and taught to help out others before ourselves.

We went through some very difficult times in this house.  My Mum has Bi Polar which was undiagnosed for many, many years, this was very difficult to deal with as a child and teenager.  It was like living with a ticking time bomb.  None of us knew what was wrong – mental health was not talked about much in those days.  No one ever thought to tell my Mum to see a doctor.  It was just a private incidence in our family.  To everyone else my Mum was just the ‘crazy’ lady who lived down the road.  My dad also couldn’t cope with all this and suffered terrible depression.  We would often find him at the bottom of a bottle of Whisky.

My sister’s moved out during this time as they found it hard to cope.  Both had there own relationships to pursue, they needed to get on with there lives.

I still love the house though.  It is the place that my parents healed and got better.  It symbolises strength and their unity, there ability to work things through.  I admire that so much and it is the main reason I am taking my family through the journey I’m currently going through.

I was the last of the three children to move out.  As we flew the nest one by one, my parents really began to struggle financially as we had all been contributing to the house keeping as soon as we became employed.  I stayed with my parents much longer than I needed just to help them out.  The last two years I was there I paid there rent for them.  I felt I needed to repay them for the period of time when they took care of me, despite their struggles.  Believe me, there were times when I hated living with them and I wanted to walk away but family is family and you support them no matter what.

They came through the bad times and my relationship with them is all the better for it.  They still struggle financially so I now pay my Mum to look after our children whilst I work.  My Mum is much better now but she still has off days, but it’s great that my children are growing up with an understanding of mental health issues which is spoken about openly in our family, (along with Daddy’s addiction and Mummy’s work with PMLD, they are going to be very worldly wise).  I am very proud of that!

So, at the moment I don’t feel like the place I have lived in for coming up seven years is ‘home’.  I actually don’t like it much at all.  I feel guilty about that as it is the place I am bringing up my children.  I then think back to my family home and all the hard times we had there and there is still a sense of nostalgia.  I hope my children will feel this about their home and I hope one day I will feel that way too.  At the moment there are so many bad memories, but I feel hope as I plan to replace them with good ones!  That is what my blog is all about!

Note:  I absolutely realise that I have gone off on a tangent.  The prompt was supposed to be a descriptive place, whereas I’ve gone on more of a nostalgic journey!  I hope you enjoyed anyway! X