Going Home

I like rules. I’ve always been good at following them. I’ve always wanted to know them upfront. I like the structure and certainty they bring. When I know what the rules are I can control what I’m doing – the timeline, the process, and the outcome. They let me understand how to work the system. They tell me what I need to know to make things go my way. And if they seem unreasonable or unfair or if I just can’t live up to them, I know to opt out.

I’ve always reacted poorly when you move a deadline on me. A significant one. Because it means that the rules for what needs to get done, when, and why are changing in real time, which means they weren’t actually rules to begin with. I started ballet when I was four years old. And from very early on I was fixated on one crucial point in time – the day I turned eight years old I would be allowed to start training in pointe shoes instead of basic slippers. I remember staring at the posters of prima ballerinas that were plastered around the little studio and not being able to wait until the day I got to wear ballet shoes like them. I worked hard, I moved up into more advanced classes, and when my eighth birthday was just around the corner…our teacher changed the rules. The studio-wide mandate became that you now had to be ten to get pointe shoes.

I quit the next day. (Clearly I had parents who were inclined to encourage righteous indignation in their child). My language didn’t completely deteriorate until I started working in advertising so eight-year-old-me didn’t say it exactly this way – but this was bullshit. I’d followed all the rules. I’d done everything right. And just as I get to the finish line, you move it out on me by two years?! Forget it.

I spent the end of 2018 and almost all of 2019 waiting as another deadline kept moving out on me. Waiting for the moment that I didn’t have to be a secret anymore. Waiting for the day that I could be seen in certain parts of town in the daylight. Or post a photo of us online. Maybe even get invited to a family gathering or holiday. Even as it continued to move out on me, the deadline remained the same: “Just a little longer.”

Every day my mind screamed the same way it had when I was a little kid. How much longer is it going to be like this? What do I have to do to change it? How will I know if I’m getting closer? What are the rules? But I was afraid of the answer I would get if I asked. I thought I could control the situation better if I pretended everything was okay. And so instead of screaming I kept saying…okay.

I don’t know if that’s what makes the ever-moving deadline of our current predicament so tough to swallow. But I’ll tell you, my patience is shot. “Two more weeks of shelter in place, and then we’ll reassess.” “We’re doing this to flatten the curve.” I get it. I promise I do. But am I the only one who has no real idea what that means? As you’re all well aware, me talking about data is like Jeff Bezos talking about empathy. It’s not my area. But I look at the charts in the Globe each day and I think: that curve looks pretty flat to me, so…is it? What does “flat” mean, exactly? How will I know it when I see it? What will that mean for me then?

As much as a lot of us like to think that we love an adventure and seek the thrill of new possibilities and are eager to take the plunge via scuba gear, bungee cord, or international plane ticket into the unknown – the truth is we’re generally bad at Undefined. Open-ended isn’t our jam. I was doing some reading about the psychology behind mysteries and why we’re so captivated by them. It turns out there’s a reason a lot of us flip to the last page of a book to see how it ends. Or freak out when a great movie or a beloved TV series has a final scene that leaves things unresolved (looking at you, Sopranos). It’s the same reason that as kids we couldn’t eat cereal fast enough to see what the prize was at the bottom of the box, even though it always kind of sucked. The human mind can’t stand not to have an answer. It makes us physically uncomfortable not to know.

I used to have a go-to move whenever I got really stressed or overwhelmed or blindsided by something that left me at a loss for what to do next. I went back to the house I grew up in on Comstock Lane in Topsfield. Whenever I walked in there I just felt better. Everything was always exactly as I’d left it: brown leather chairs around a glass table in the great room even though I don’t think any of us ever sat at that table, ever. Coral pink walls in the living room. A white Berber rug in the family room that we were all forbidden to walk on in shoes from the time I was five until I was thirty-three. And my room. Blue lacy drapes and a green rug and heavy dark wood furniture that displayed gymnastics trophies and troll dolls and photos from our eighth-grade math team camping trip. It was the only bedroom in the whole house that had windows that faced both east and west. When the sun rose above the cul-de-sac in the morning it woke me up. And I don’t know how many afternoons and evenings I sat at my back window, usually listening to my boombox, and watched the sun set behind the big trees that lined the far side of our backyard. I loved it there. Problems always felt smaller there.

My parents sold the house in 2015. I remember planning to go home in the two weeks leading up to them moving out. I thought about eating dinner at the pool. Drinking a beer on the back patio. Spending a last night in my bed. I thought about lying out on the thick grass of the backyard and looking up at the sky until the stars came out – covered head to toe with blankets so that I didn’t get eaten alive by mosquitoes. But something stopped me from going. The realtor had convinced my mom to take down all the wallpaper – which had been in nearly every room, including the bathrooms – and replace it with neutral paint to make the house more sellable to a younger audience. My brother, sister, and I had emptied the last of our stuffed animals and trinkets out of our rooms almost a year earlier. I didn’t want to do a walk-through of a house that was vaguely reminiscent of the one I grew up in. I wanted to always remember my home the way it was.  

Today, no matter what news publication I read or friend I talk to, they all agree on one thing: the post-pandemic world is going to look different than the world we remember. We’ll get to the other side eventually. But our lives can’t go back to what they were.

The one guarantee is that the rules are gonna change. Open-ended, full stop.

Hearing it makes my body hurt. Thinking about it makes me want to opt out.

When I’ve started feeling really low about it all – this somewhere far off, certainly different future – I make myself remember a drive I took a month ago. I was feeling really lousy. I’d been indoors most of the day, but the rain had finally broken and the low sun started to peek out around 5:30. I got in my car and started driving – nowhere in particular at first. I got on 93 north, took a left to head through the tunnel and made my way over the Tobin Bridge. When I got onto Route 1 I knew where I was heading. I wanted to go home.

I got off exit 50 towards Topsfield and made my way up and down the familiar hills leading into the town center. I went by my elementary school and the old cemetery, took a left on to Bare Hill and then the second left onto Comstock Lane. I didn’t get self-conscious until I was a few minutes out – my car has a more-than-conspicuous roof rack on it so that I can shuttle my rowing shell back and forth to the river. Comstock has five houses on it – doing slow loops incognito around the cul-de-sac isn’t really a thing. But I thought, “Screw it – the sun’s almost down and it’s dinner time. I’ll do a couple of laps then take off.”

But when I turned onto Comstock I could only make it half way down – there were a handful of people sitting in plastic Adirondack chairs in the middle of the street, having a block party at the end of a driveway. My driveway. They all turned to look at my car and two of them stood up –  my neighbors from when I was a kid. Twenty years older than the last time I’d seen them. They started smiling and jumping up and down and yelling for me to pull over. I parked my car against the curb and got out. After two solid minutes of screaming “No way!” over and over they handed me a beer and introduced me to the other two people they were with. It was the couple who’d bought our house five years ago. The mom is the principal of the elementary school I went to. Their daughter is a star hockey player in the middle school. They told me how great my parents had been during the sale. They said my mom had made them take off their shoes before walking on the Berber rug, even though they planned to tear it out when they moved in. They asked after my family and invited me to come back post-COVID so I could come inside and they’d give me a tour. It was starting to get dark and cold, and they waved goodbye as they headed inside to start dinner for their kids. My old neighbors showed me pictures of their grandkids and invited me to come by any time, and then they grabbed their chairs and headed home too.

I stood there for a couple minutes before getting in my car. The house looked a little different. The front doors were a dark maroon, far more subtle than the pink color they’d been my whole childhood. There was a new bench in the front yard. A hockey net had replaced the basketball hoop at the top of the driveway. But the house itself was the same shade of blue. The tree I planted on Arbor Day in the fourth grade was still growing tall on the slope of the small hill to the right of the driveway. The mailbox was knocked slightly off-center on its post – so clearly the plow guy is the same.

My house had changed from the way I remembered it. But it still looked like home. And in that moment it was still the only place in the world I wanted to be. I got in my car, started the engine, and as I drove away I felt okay.

So maybe all of this will eventually be okay, too.