I just returned from a week-long vacation in New Hampshire with M. I hadn’t been home in at least two years, maybe longer. It feels strange calling New Hampshire “home” because I haven’t lived there full-time since 1992. But New Hampshire IS home to me and always will be. Why is that? Why do I still have such an attachment to a place I left behind three decades ago with no desire to move back? What is home to a person, to me?
I found myself asking these questions a lot during this visit.
I was born and raised in a small town in New Hampshire, surrounded by Northern Oaks, clean air, green grass, unlocked doors, and neighbors who knew each other and even visited on occasion. Not too often though. This was New Hampshire after all, the Live Free or Die state, where people don’t get too close until they know you, and they respect each other’s privacy. There were kids in my neighborhood–Anne, her sister Jeanine, my friend Todd, who lived around the corner for a time–and we were constantly outside, riding our bikes and playing Ghost in the Graveyard, Starsky & Hutch, or whiffle ball. Our parents never worried about where we were, or that we’d be kidnapped off the street. They just wanted us outside and out of their hair. It was a wonderful, safe, and happy place to grow up. Indeed, that could be me singing John Cougar Mellencamp’s song ‘Small Town’. Sometimes I fantasize they’ll play it at my funeral.
I lived in one house for my entire childhood. I attended one elementary school in a class that never exceeded 15 kids. I kissed my first girl in New Hampshire. I made my best friends in New Hampshire. I held my first job as a restaurant dishwasher in New Hampshire. I had my first serious girlfriend in New Hampshire. I lost my virginity in New Hampshire. I almost broke my face on a ski mountain in New Hampshire.
And I drove my first car in New Hampshire–a baby blue, ugly as sin, AMC Gremlin handed down to me by my father that had six cylinders, no power steering, and a comically fat ass. It looked a bit like this:
Fugly, right? The runt of the litter.
I still thought it was cool as shit because it had a silver Gremlin on the trunk, a sleek black racing stripe down the side, and most of all, it was MINE. I did wish it was a different color though. I don’t know what possessed my father to buy a powder blue car. He was color-blind, so maybe that was it. Shitty color aside, that hideous Gremlin gave me my first glorious taste of freedom and independence at the young age of 16. Sure, it was ugly as fuck, but it was also unique–dare I say special–so much so that the Gremlin became my personal brand the second my dad handed me the keys. If my friends happened to see a baby blue Gremlin on the road somewhere, they KNEW it was me. It was like seeing a powder blue unicorn in the wild. Who else would choose to drive a car that goddamned ugly? Only my father would. And me, by bequeathment and necessity.
Due to its exotic appearance (putting it kindly), my Gremlin routinely betrayed my privacy. On a Saturday night, I’d be parked down by the beach for a make-out/petting sesh with a girlfriend, and the following Monday some wiseass would approach my high school lunch table and announce to everyone that he saw my Gremlin parked in front of the beach wall on Saturday night with all the windows fogged up.
‘I know what you were doing in that car, you nasty boy.’
Yes, my friends mocked my Gremlin relentlessly, but that car was fucking reliable, even if it took the strength of Hercules to turn the steering wheel whenever I needed to do a 180 in a parking lot. I had a high school friend whose car broke down so often that I became his personal chauffeur. He was so grateful for the free rides I gave him that he praised my Gremlin in a moving, handwritten yearbook dedication when we graduated. I also gave tribute to my beloved Gremlin in the blurb underneath my high school yearbook photo. I’m telling you, it was my brand. People still talk about it.
Here’s me lying on the hood in my parents’ driveway, trying to act like a cool 80s kid from The Breakfast Club:
Note the bleached jeans, likely tightrolled at the bottom, hightop Reeboks, Vuarnet sunglasses, and jean jacket, which I chose to pair with blue jeans like a West Virginia hick.
John Bender had nothing on me.
Sidenote: Those black ‘racing stripes’ on the Gremlin’s hood are decals that were stuck on by my father, who thought they added racing flair to this hilariously big-assed car. You can also see signs of rust on the right side of the hood. It was much worse at the bottom of the car, which bore the brunt of shitty New England road conditions and was rusted out so bad, my dad used Bondo to try and cover it up. Then he shellacked the whole thing with baby blue paint for ‘consistency’. In reality, it looked like a bad sandpaper job. Next time spring for the Tru-coat when you buy the car, you cheap bastard.
The above only begins to explain why I still call New Hampshire home, instead of New York, where I’ve spent most of my adult life.
What is home? Home is the feeling I get whenever I return to New Hampshire, and more specifically, when I return to my hometown and the idyllic setting of my formative years. My adrenaline kicks in the second I turn off Route 1 and pass the Revolutionary War cannon and its accompanying cannonball pyramid in the town common. This surge is immediately followed by a wave of heart-piercing nostalgia as I pass my elementary school on the left–a special place that’s full of so many happy memories for me–then make a short drive over the bridge that traverses Route 95, past the library and town hall, two left turns, passing Anne’s old house on the right, rounding the corner, and there’s my house on the left, marked by a large rock at the end of the driveway that gets smaller and smaller every time I see it.
Yes, it’s still MY house. Two different families have lived there since my mother sold it in 2013, but my parents lived there for 40 fucking years, so it’s still MY house.
My intense nostalgia, waves of bittersweet memories that flood my consciousness all at once during the mile-long drive from Route 1 to my house, coupled with an acute awareness of the passage of time and how much has changed since I was young–how my father and two of my close friends are now dead, how wonderful my childhood was in so many ways, how I’ll never get those pristine and innocent years back, how I didn’t appreciate them when I had them–are impossible to put into words. But it’s this feeling I get in my chest whenever I go back to New Hampshire that still makes it home to me and always will. I always get this feeling when I go home. It never disappoints.
The second part of what still makes New Hampshire home to me is the people–friends, former neighbors, former teachers, and parents of friends–who have known me since I was a boy. There was a time when I took these people for granted. I don’t do that any more. The older I get, the more I understand and appreciate how special these people are and how lucky I am to have them in my life. Not only them, but my shared history with them. My New Hampshire roots–roots that are buried in a specific time and place–are a big part of my identity and who I am. In an often cold world, these roots have given me strength, security, and confidence in facing life’s challenges and adversities. I’m fortunate to have them.
So whenever I return to New Hampshire, no matter how long it’s been, I not only visit places that are meaningful to me, but I also make it a point to reconnect with special people from my childhood and teenage years, as many of them as possible. There’s never enough time to see everyone I want to see, but even if it’s only one or two of my close friends or former neighbors, it’s a reunion that I want to make happen, need to make happen, for myself because it always fills my cup and rejuvenates me.
So it was on this recent visit. I visited Anne’s sister Jeanine, who I’ve known since she was just a baby. I reintroduced her to M., whom she hadn’t seen since M. was 7. Jeanine then graciously offered to entertain M. while I met up with some of my old high school friends at a nearby restaurant and bar. I don’t think our night together would have been quite the same if M. had been there, so I’m incredibly grateful to Jeanine for this.
Here we are, in between laughing our asses off reminiscing about stupid decisions that left one of us bloodied, blotto drunk, lying in a ditch, or arrested:
I’ve known one of these guys since the first grade. The others I’ve known since high school. I love all of them. In their own way, each of these men (why does it feel weird to refer to them this way?) shares a lifetime of memories with me, and each of them is irreplaceable. That night, like we always do, we reminisced about our memories together, both good and bad, laughed about the clueless shit we did, and updated each other on our lives. What’s really cool now is that we also talk about our kids and our experience as fathers, husbands (or divorcees, in my case), and in marriages and relationships. We talk about aging parents, losing parents, and how hard this is. How it changes you.
It was an incredible night. It always is, and it always ends too soon.
This visit aside, there have been times in my life when I was really down–when I got separated, then divorced from Ex., after I lost my father–when I instinctively got in my car and drove up to New Hampshire to… I don’t know what to call it. Revitalize myself? Return to my source? Remember who I am? I was a bee returning to a hive. After my separation from Ex. seven years ago, when I was pretty emotional and a bit of a mess, two of the guys in that photo lifted me up and made me feel better. They probably don’t even know they did it. It was their empathy and vulnerability, the concerned look on their faces, how they listened to me with authenticity and without judgment, and how they shared their own difficult experiences, which brightened my outlook and made me exhale for the first time in a long time. It would take me years to fully come back emotionally, but looking back, that visit, that night with them, started my restoration. It gave me purchase on the first rock of the mountain that I needed to climb.
It’s hard to put into words how valuable this is to me. To have this kind of connection with people–a lifetime connection–where you relate to people at multiple stages of life and can talk to them about all of it in an authentic and secure way from the vantage point of a shared history that spans decades. I don’t have many male friendships like this, certainly very few that I’ve made later in life. I have other close friends I haven’t seen in many years about whom I feel the same way. Not all of them are men, I should note that too. With all of these people, I know that if they suddenly were to appear in front of me, nothing will have changed. We’d relate to each other the exact same way we always have, because we share roots together. We share a history and a common experience. That is fucking special. One of the most special things to me in this life.
This is why New Hampshire is still home to me. It’s the place and the people and the memories I have growing up there that make it home to me. I have lived in, or visited other places in my life that gave me a similar feeling. New York City, Williamsburg, and Domodossola, come to mind. But none of them are home. New Hampshire is Home.
Which brings me to this. During one of our conversations the other night, one of my friends asked me how far away Ex. lives from me and how we manage our custody situation with M. I responded that she lives 25 miles away from me now, that joint custody isn’t always easy to manage due to the geographic distance between us, that I’m living in the bottom half of a rental house in a town I wouldn’t choose for myself, and I’m stuck here until M. goes to college.
Then, with all of them looking at me, I made a clockwise motion around the table and said:
‘I’m staying there until she goes to college because I want my daughter to have THIS. This is special. Not everyone gets this. I want her to have roots in one place. I want her to have connections like this with her friends. I want her to have what I had. I already had my childhood. Now it’s her turn. I can suck it up for a few years. She’s happy and thriving, and I want to do what I can to keep it going.’
I bring this up not to make myself look good, but because it’s something I struggle with. Not everyone agrees with this choice I’m making, this prison in which I’ve chosen to place myself for the foreseeable future. It’s limiting my life in many ways. My friends understand because they had a similar childhood experience as me, so they can see the value in my choice. But not everyone does. When we separated, Ex. didn’t think it was a big deal to have M. change schools before the third grade if necessary, so she initially refused to agree to a provision in our divorce agreement that required M. to stay in the same school district where Ex. was living at the time. This provision was one of the only things we fought about in negotiating our divorce. Given my own background, all the upheaval M. had experienced already in her young life, and the fact that she’s both adopted and an only child, it was really important to me that she have at least one constant in her life: one hometown, one school, and a group of friends she would know throughout her childhood and teenage years. Ex. didn’t view this the same way. She thought it would be fine if M. changed schools before the third grade. So we paid our lawyers to litigate this for a while.
Once the lawyers’ bills began piling up, Ex. and I reached a compromise where she could leave the school district if she wanted, with a 25-mile geographic boundary from where she was currently living, and if I chose to move to M.’s school district, M. would be required to attend school there. Sure enough, within two years of our divorce agreement, Ex. left the school district to buy a four-bedroom house with her then-boyfriend, who had two teenage daughters of his own. She moved twenty-four miles away from M.’s school, to a town that’s just within the geographic limit in our agreement and a half-hour drive away without traffic. When Ex. left, I moved into her apartment so M. could stay in the school she loves and keep her social circle of friends.
To say that living in Ex.’s old apartment and sleeping in her old bedroom was initially awkward as fuck is a serious understatement. But it was necessary. I only had a few weeks to find an apartment, and there were very few rental apartments available in the narrow sliver of the town where M.’s elementary school is located. None of the apartments I saw were as nice or affordable as the one Ex. was living in, and moving here allowed M. to keep the same bedroom she had before. I could also walk her to school.
So I moved in, lit a bunch of candles to get rid of all the shitty ju-ju, and adapted to living in a place that was chosen for me, instead of the other way around–the first time in my life that’s ever happened. I’ve been here ever since, and there’s no end in sight for the next seven years, until M. graduates high school.
But she’s happy and thriving here. She has a great group of friends who have values and are being raised right. She’s confident and secure, empathetic, compassionate, and open to meeting new people in a way that I wasn’t at her age. She plays on sports teams here, she’s been in school plays here, and she loves the town and her school. I couldn’t imagine taking all this happiness and security away from her, throwing her entire world and social circle up in the air, and making her start her life all over just so I can live in a nice house and town where I prefer to live. That would be so fucking selfish I wouldn’t be able to live with myself or the guilt.
Not everyone agrees with me about this.
Kids are resilient. They’re adaptable. M. would make new friends in time. She would be fine, so there’s no need for you to stay where you are. You’re not in prison. You can move and find a better situation for yourself.
I’ve heard this repeatedly since I moved here. Sure, kids are resilient and adaptable. But the last two are maybes, not certainties. Maybe she’d make new friends. Maybe she would adapt. But maybe she wouldn’t, or not very easily. And even if she did, how easy would that be for her? Would her new friends be of the same quality and have the same values as her current friends? Would they treat her the same? Would she have as many of them as she has now? Would she feel as good about them as she does about her current friends and school? Even in a best case scenario, these are all unknowns. Guesses. Hope for the bests.
So why do it? In a social media world chock-full of escalating teen anxiety, bullying, too much available information, and parental minefields, why dive into the Pool of the Unknown when there’s no reason to do so, other than the totally selfish reason of having a nicer home and living situation for myself? To me, that would be selfish and stupid. It would also fuck with a pretty decent situation up until this point. Even with the best parents, there are no guarantees in life when it comes to your kids. Even if I stay here until M. is in college, there’s no certainty that she’ll avoid all of the horrible pitfalls that plague other teenagers, particularly young girls, parental nightmares like drugs, alcohol, depression, bullying, cutting, body issues, etc. So a parent can only deal in knowns and probabilities and make the best decisions possible on that basis.
That’s what I’m doing. All the knowns, probabilities, and every parental instinct in my body tell me that M. will be better off, more secure, more confident, and happier if she grows up in this town and has what I had, or as close to it as she can get. I feel this in my bones, and no one will ever convince me otherwise. Sure, maybe it’s my unconscious bias at work. But I don’t give a fuck. You raise your kid the way you want, and I’ll raise mine the way I want. From what I’ve read about the potential negative impact of moving a kid around, I’m more than comfortable with my choice. It would be one thing if I had to do it because I lost my job or had to move for financial or health reasons. Then I wouldn’t have a choice. We’d need to suck it up, make hard decisions, and hope for the best. But moving her away from a place and friends she loves just for a simple lifestyle choice? Fuck that. Selfish assholes do that. I may be an asshole sometimes, but I’m not a selfish one. Not when it comes to her.
One day I want M. to have a home to return to, just like I do. I want her to have a place like my hometown in New Hampshire where she has roots and lifelong friends whom she can see regularly and confide in when life gets difficult, or with whom she can reminisce about their shared childhood, which is a pure joy in itself. This is why I bring M. to New Hampshire from time to time to show her the house I grew up in and the elementary school and high school I attended. It’s why I introduce her to friends I’ve known my entire life. I want her to feel these roots with me, to see what it’s like to have a connection to a single, special place in her life. I want her to know that wherever her life may take her, she can always go home again to restore herself, remember who she is and where she came from, and reconnect with a place and people she loves. My parents gave me this gift, this legacy. I want her to have it too.
