home is where the couch is

I was on a weekend trip earlier this year when it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks that I would never again live in Oklahoma.  

A delayed reaction, given that I’ve lived in southern California for seven years, and now have married a man who has long insisted that we were stuck in Los Angeles.  

Some part of me believed that this whole California thing was just a phase in my life, a time I would look back at fondly as “my twenties” or “my liberal period.”  Absolutely a patch of me believed that one day this whole Hollywood thing would be laughable, and I would move back to Oklahoma and marry some hometown boy and we would have a zillion babies and my “real” life would start.  You know, the life you plan for yourself when you’re in the third grade.  That’s the real Laura, and some other version of her is back there living it and I’m thinking pretty soon I need to go meet up with her.  

Because in a hundred years I couldn’t have dreamed of what my life has become.  And God is Good and I’ve Never Been Happier and all of those things, but my soul was a little confused when it finally caught up with what my brain has been processing since last year.  

I chose to leave my entire family in Oklahoma and move to Los Angeles for a thousand reasons, not the least of which was to reinvent myself.  The City of Angels became home to me right away, not because of any spiritual kinship, but because it provided me with a place to take in a full breath.  To think clearly.  To nurse wounds and to dye my hair black.  I’ll always be grateful for that.  

But long after my lungs had fully expanded and my hair was back to blonde, I stayed.  I stayed because I had a cool job, and a smattering of friends, and even through waves of homesickness, I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else.

For a long time I didn’t feel rooted anywhere.  Each time I returned to Oklahoma, it felt less and less comfortable, like I was a guest.  But I still didn’t feel 100% content in Los Angeles either.  I moved around a lot, lived in some great places, but I still didn’t have any real furniture.  I always had to hope that my roommate had a couch.

There was a three year time period in my childhood where – a complicated, uninteresting story too long to tell here – my family moved houses roughly seven times.  The running joke became that home is where the couch was.  We had a navy blue couch with big white flowers on it that was so comfortable.  And it became our symbol of “home.”

I have my own blue couch now.  I fell in love with it on sight, and it became the object I crafted my new living room around.  On the weekend trip away when I was realizing that my definition of “home” had become all mixed up, I couldn’t stop thinking about that couch.  It didn’t yet symbolize “home” to me – it was too new, there were too few memories – but it was my first big purchase as a married woman, and I guess it came to symbolize what I want our home to be.  

When I got back to Los Angeles, I knew that somehow I had crossed a bridge.  I was ready to truly build a life here.  Ready.  After nearly seven years.  Somehow when I wasn’t paying attention, I had acquired a network of friends and activities, but now it seemed different.  Now it was time to start investing in these relationships, letting my roots sink deeply with no end in sight.  Now it was time to treat this city and these people like the place it had become:  home.   

If “home is where the heart is” then my poor thing has been stretched to its farthest point without ripping.  Half of my heart will always be with my first family, with our history, and with the new life we keep bringing into the world.  But I have a new family now, and a new blue couch.  And my heart swells at the very thought of both.  

Comments

[Kara Dunn]

I think this is a general late 20s/early 30s revelation that many of us go through. We look around and ask, “How did I end up here?” or “Is this who I am?” or “Where do I go from here?” And a person's life can be fabulously normal or painstakingly fabulous (and one can easily mistakenly self-diagnosis which characteristics best fit), but there comes that moment when you first realize that the life you had envisioned for yourself at 16 is so different from the one you are living at 29. The goal, at least for me, is to challenge the “when” of life, accept the “what” and always, always respect the inner “who”. “Why“ is God’s line of business. “Where” is insignificant. And that is okay. Really.

[Kelley Hart Jenkins]

I love this post! So well put. I feel what you're saying, being a transplant myself, though I never had that deep connection with Wyoming that you have with Oklahoma. We're all glad that you're here and settling in

[Megan]

oh, laura. I love this. I so identify with your Real Laura as there is a part of me who still can't quite believe that I married before 21 and am home with babies now instead of in Manhattan, editing manuscripts by day and writing my own at night, smoking cigarettes and wearing stilettos and all that.

And I totally get that realization that it really is time to connect right where you are. Yep, living that, too.

This is a great post. My favorite of yours so far, I think. And that is one fabulous couch, friend! Definitely worthy of building a home around.