Contradictions of Home

It is June and we are on our annual trip to visit my parents in Wisconsin. One evening my son, unbidden, turns off the nintendo and asks if he can go outside. This is the childhood I want for him, summers running barefoot in soft grass that does not scream for water.

As we drive country roads to reach tourist attractions my heart cries out and reaches for creeks and cat tails and red winged blackbirds. Home. Home. Home. This is the childhood I want for my son. I want him to have the childhood I had.

Also I will do literally anything in my power to protect him from the childhood I had.

My parents now live across the county line from where I grew up. I know the main drags of the area, the state highways, but find myself struggling to visualize how the county roads tie together. Following our phone's directions I see parts of the nearest town I've never seen before.

We head to a small town fair. The carnival is set up on a field full of grass and white clover. There are no lines for any of the rides. Perhaps there will be in the evening but even at its most crowded it will likely feel slow and calm to me, now that my nerves are calibrated to LA.

I anxiously scan the faces of the adults we pass. We are close enough to where I went to school that I might spot a familiar face, but not so close that it's guaranteed.

I don’t think I have ever stepped foot in this field before but it feels full of ghosts. I am home. I am an outsider. I don't know if I have ever felt the first without the second.

In LA it matters less. Most of us are outsiders. I think even most of the insiders are outsiders. I feel safe in my anonymity.

Here, though, it feels dangerous. Rationally I know it isn’t, not really, but my nerves jangle with the edges of my difference.

None of this is rooted in reality. I am romanticizing the power of place, the wonder of water. I am catastrophizing the danger of difference.

I was a weird child. Would I have struggled with loneliness and always felt myself an outcast no matter where I grew up? It is hard to know.

I fight the caricatures of rural Wisconsin I encounter. At the same time I invoke my own.

It feels, though, like a matter of statistics. How can you possibly find your people if from 5 years old until 18 there are only 40 or so to choose from?

A few weeks ago at a work event a colleague from DC asked me if I liked living in LA. I didn’t know how to answer. I told him I hadn't come up with anywhere else I wanted to live.

Los Angeles is exhausting. I love it and find it ridiculous in the best ways but increasingly wonder how living in a county with a population bigger than most US states makes sense. I fantasize about leaving.

I don't know where I'd go. Not here. I couldn’t live here. No, that's not true. I could learn to live here but I could never make my son. I'd be too afraid he'd have to shrink himself and that even so he still wouldn't fit.