Hearth

Introduction

This post is going to be a little different than some of my others. I want to talk about something that, while important to being Asatru and a Norseman, it doesn’t really tie into my research or my journey in the SCA. Instead, it sort of ties in with the camping posts I have been making, because it is about home. Home
is something that is incredibly personal, not just in what it physically is, but also in what
it represents. To some cultures, home is the extended family all living in a single building; to others, it is just a little apartment that you have gotten on your own. In the 10c, home was a homestead, a small farm with several buildings where an extended (possibly, but not confirmed multigenerational) family lived and worked.  To me, my home is a place where my nuclear family lives, but the extended clan that I am a part of can gather for holy days. As a family of 5, finding an ideal space that doesn’t break the bank in Miami is heartbreaking. Too often you find yourself priced out of any home that makes sense for your family, and this is just talking about rentals, we aren’t even attempting to buy at this time.

I provide this as a bit of background information to give an idea of where I am and why I am writing this. Regular readers may remember that for about three years I owned a game store and it took a lot out of me. My wife and I sacrificed a ton to try and keep it open, including our home. We were never without shelter; I am very fortunate that my mother was able to take us all in and give us a place to live while we kept at the store. Eventually, the store closed despite our best efforts, but we remained living at my mother’s as we figured out our next step. We lived there for just under 14 months, which gave me a ton of time to think and ponder the meaning of home. This past weekend, we finally
moved into a townhouse, and while it wasn’t a storybook move, it already feels like home.

Home vs Shelter

We are all raised with sayings like “a man’s home is his castle”, “home is where the heart rests’ etc. These things all speak of this feeling of safety and belonging that not everyone gets: for so many people, the place where they live is under threat or so far from ideal that they never feel like they have a home. I spent the last 14 months homeless, but I was not without somewhere to live. I was incredibly lucky that I had a roof and a warm bed. That's a lot more than many people have, but I didn’t have a home. Oddly enough, this is a distinction I might not have noticed a decade ago, when I was younger and in my first marriage. I had never really had that sense of safety: we moved around a lot and never really set down roots. It wasn’t until I moved in with Beatrice that I realized how much a home means… to have a place that you can come home to and rest and feel safe.

Shelter is a place that protects you from the outside; it’s one of the first things that survival manuals tell you to focus on, and one of the base Maslow needs. It keeps you safe, but it doesn’t nourish you and it doesn’t allow you to recharge and grow. A shelter might be an apartment you rent that was all you can find, but it's in a bad neighborhood or maybe the price is just out of your range so you are always in danger of losing it. In my case, my shelter for the last 14 months was actually my childhood home, a beautiful house that my mother still lives in. The problem was that it couldn’t be “our home” due to differences in opinion and the crowding of space. My mother was welcoming in every way she could be, but in the end neither of us were really raised to have a multigenerational home and the house wasn’t suited to it. This caused clashes in the raising of the girls, the use of common areas, and so much more. Add to that the simple idea of having known your own space and privacy and now not having it, and it became a strain to bear.

Our Journey

The last time my little family really had a home that wasn’t under threat was before the store opened, nearly four years ago. We had just moved into a small townhouse, but everyone was excited about it. We made that place our home, and you could feel it.  We had started to buy our furniture for it, and overall it felt like we had gained some stability, or as Maslow would put it security. We weren’t totally there but it felt like we were on our way. When we felt like we were doing well, we made the choice to take the risk of opening our own business, and that security was the first thing we sacrificed.

Along the way, we had to move two more times before we ended up at mom’s, and each place felt like a stopping point. They didn’t feel like home, each for their own reasons, but the main cause of the lack of security was the lack of solid stable income. We were always scared we were going to lose everything.

Over the three years of all this instability, it has caused us as a family some spiritual damage. We are all scared now of losing the things we have, we are all worried about every bump in the road. Our girls, who are still too young for such things, understand entirely too intimately that money is finite and that we as a family don’t have as much as some others. We do try and teach them that while there are always people who have more, there are also people who have less, and that we should be grateful for all the things we do have. This is a tough lesson to learn for a preteen who wants to have the newest clothes or accessories to fit in.

Our New Home

Six months ago, after the store closed down, I was fortunate enough to have help finding a job by a good friend of mine. I was scared to go back into the workforce, especially into a corporate position of this nature, but it has done wonders for me. I have time off, I can be with my children and not just around them like when they were at the store with me. More than any of that, I have a stable paycheck. This has been the start of us rebuilding our lives, a stable job that allowed us to save enough money to finally begin the long search to find our new home.

Our family preparing for a hurricane. 

At first, the search was disheartening: everything was too small, too far, or too expensive. In Miami, the cost-of-living-to-wage ratio is among the worst in the nation, and even though we both work very hard to earn enough money, the last thing we wanted to do was live outside our means and have our home remain under threat.  Finally, after months of either searching on our own or with unreliable realtors, we were very lucky to meet Anthony Maiello (https://www.facebook.com/Anthony-Maiello-a-Real-Estate-Empire-Group-Realtor-101903754549059/), a realtor who genuinely cared about our needs and wanted to find us the perfect home for our family, not just a shelter for us and a commission for him. With his help we were able to find our new townhome. It isn’t the perfect place (I doubt we will find that until we buy our forever home), but it is certainly a great beautiful place for us to build a home and take the next steps in our lives.

The Move

I spent the weeks leading up to the move in a ball of nerves. I was worried we would get denied at the last moment by the landlords. I was worried that we wouldn’t have the money for the last of the down payment. I was terrified that the girls wouldn't like the house or we wouldn't be able to fit our needs in it. I was worried that things just wouldn't go the right way. The week of the move, I was so worried about not being able to move everything properly that I went to work everyday in jeans and a t-shirt (instead of my usual business attire) so that I could run out and head to storage to take another load of things to the house. My wife, while not understanding why this move had me so nervous, did everything she could to help ease my fears. She was also going to storage every day and grabbing things, but more importantly she and her mom set up our daughters’ rooms so they would move into their new space as if it was their old space and better. Anything to make the move smooth for everyone.

The day of the move, only a few of our friends were able to help. This led to more panic in me, but the truth is that the Stophers’ are some of the best people I know and with all their help we moved faster and more efficiently than ever before. By 4pm, everything was in the new house and we were all on the couch pondering our new aches and pains. It was done, at least the first step… now, to turn it from a shelter to a home. I imagine that will take a few weeks, but I already feel better.

The Girls

To me, the scariest part of the move was that even after everything was done and the girls were in the new house... they didn’t feel safe.You could see it in the way they reacted: it wasn’t the innocent joy of when we moved into that home all those years ago; it was a tentative and cautious thing, unsure yet if this was their home. That’s the hardest part to me. So now, it's time to give them that safe space, build it up again so they know they have stability. Our core needs are met, now we need to build security.

Conclusion

Too often we settle for shelter, or are forced to settle for it. We have lost sight of how important an actual home is. Home is where the heart rests, shelter is where the body rests. If you don’t have both, you will start to feel rundown and tired, and how will you continue to best the struggles of life when
you lose sight of what you are fighting for?

Remember that as long as we keep stepping forward, we will get to our goals. Christopher Reeve said it best “ So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.”