Squatter Guest Post by Natalie from The Mommy Chronicles
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What is a home?
Is it the place you lay your weary head?
Is it a place filled with memories?
Is it a region, and not an actual abode?
Do you feel like you are home when you enter your house at night?
I feel like that some days, too.
But not today.
Today I feel like a wanderer, a Nomad. When I say today, I mean this general time frame. As in this month year decade. Anybody who knows me knows that I’m suffering from stability withdrawal. I have recently become a single mother and I’m a lifelong apartment dweller.
For those who may feel disconnected from the whole lease/rental situation, I have compiled an actual list of things I had to initial before my new home was officially mine.
18. Environmental Indemnification: To the fullest extent allowed bylaw (I didn’t miss a space, they did), Resident acknowledges that certain materials containing potentially health-affecting substances may exist on the premises.
OK, like chlorine, right? Yes, I can deal with that. And pesticide. I have dealt with my fair share of termite’s scorpion’s rattlesnake’s desert critters. Yeah, I have no problem with pesticide. Spray those suckers gooooood.
19. Moisture Issues and Housekeeping
(I kid you not)
The following tips have been designed to help prevent the creation and build-up of moisture in your home. Many ordinary daily activities contribute to the moisture level including:
Breathing and perspiring
Bathing and Showering
Aquariums
Cooking
Wet Clothes
My first thought? No sh*t Sherlock...Immediately followed by: Are you seriously implying that I might want to cut back on my breathing activities?
Let's move on to pet requirements. It's a doozy.
Each pet, whether cat or dog, requires a $300 deposit, plus $20 a month in pet rent. Dang, I need to put those cats to work. Are there laws against cat labor? Maybe I can hire them out as freeloaders. Everyone needs a freeloader.
Needless to say, while I signed all 50+ items with NJC (my initials) on my newest lease, I couldn’t help but think to myself: This is not home. This is someone else’s space that I’m putting my things in for a while.
It’s really nothing more than a storage facility for people.
So I started thinking about that whole picket fence thing. Daydreaming about the day I will literally put a white picket fence around my home if for nothing more than as a symbol. I’ll put that picket fence up around my rocks and cactus if I must. So what if it looks dumb, it will be my picket fence! I look forward to the day that the only person I have to answer to for things like oh, I dunno, breathing, is myself.
Maybe it’s easy to think of a home as just another material possession, and that may be true. But that material possession, for me, holds the stability I crave. The place to set down roots and create memories that don’t need to be uprooted every year or so. The key word here is STABILITY. I grew up without it; I don’t want the same for my son.
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As I wrote this, my cat decided to scoot her butt across the floor and I realized this at least feels like home to her.
I mean seriously, if you are comfortable enough to drag your arse across the carpet, it must be home.
And then I thought about Megan, about how she lost so much in her own rental home. It was her space, filled with her memories.
So I took a look around at my newest home and I saw it for what it is. It is still filled with my memories, with my things, and even though it belongs to someone else, it really is home.
For now.
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So what is home to you? If you own your home, is having a real home all that and a bag of chips?
Thank you Megan, for having a temporary moment of insanity and allowing me to totally crash your blog and bring the mood down. I had originally planned on posting instructions to a cake I was supposed to make last weekend (see, I can do happy, shiny subjects too), but I moved instead. I couldn't even step foot in my kitchen. Because of this, I had virtually nothing to write about other than moving and apartment living. If you are a glutton for punishment and would like to follow my journey into single motherhood, you can find me here. Sometimes I post happy things, too.
Or cakes.
Visit Natalie from The Mommy Chronicles