The mirage of home and why displacement became my greatest teacher
Thomas Wolfe was right, though I didn’t know it yet as I drove my GMC Yukon across the Texas-Louisiana border in December 2012. You can’t go home again. Not to the place you left. Not to the person you were. Not to the life you thought was waiting for you, unchanged and patient, like a room kept exactly as you left it.
I was chasing something I thought I could return to. I had dreamed about the comfort of familiar ground, the safety of “home.” What I found instead taught me that home was never a place at all.
The Arrival
Louisiana welcomed me back with humid air and the kind of December warmth that makes you question everything you thought you knew about seasons. My three daughters pressed their faces to the truck windows, not really understanding that this was going to be their new home. The youngest two were 5 and 7, having spent most of their lives in Texas. To them, Louisiana was just another trip to visit the family they saw twice a year.
My husband stayed behind to transition work, promising to follow once we’d settled. I believed we were moving toward something. Toward family, toward roots, toward the kind of childhood I wanted my daughters to have, surrounded by cousins and grandparents and the slow rhythm of Southern living.
What I found instead was a series of displacements that would teach me the difference between seeking home and creating it.
The Rental House
The small brick rental house my parents owned sat close to the family business I was prepared to take over. Simple, convenient, but constrained in ways that felt foreign after our life in Texas. Everything was different. Everything echoed smaller scale, older systems, and a completely different rhythm of living.
Our life in Texas had been very different from what greeted us in Louisiana. The school situation became my first wake-up call. My daughters had come from a Texas school equipped with technology and modern teaching methods. Now they were carrying heavy backpacks full of books, marching to the beat of a completely different drum. Two hours of homework every night left me wondering what they were actually learning in school during the day.
I watched my confident 7-year-old begin to disappear before my eyes. She had been a “big girl” since kindergarten in Texas. She greeted the front desk workers by name each morning, insisted on carrying her own backpack, and radiated the kind of self-assurance that made other parents smile. But within weeks of starting at the Louisiana school, I was watching a completely different child. She clung to her teacher’s skirt at recess, overwhelmed by systems that seemed designed to diminish rather than nurture young spirits.
The parent-teacher conference confirmed my worst fears. I walked into a room with two teachers and a counselor, all ready to discuss my daughter’s “progress.” They explained, almost proudly, that other students were now packing her bags each afternoon because it had become “too much” for her to handle. They had transformed my independent daughter into a child who “needed assistance,” not because she lacked ability, but because their approach was crushing her natural confidence.
They thought they were giving me positive updates, but I heard something entirely different. This child who had thrived in Montessori environments since 18 months old and excelled in Katy ISD public schools through second grade was retracting into a shell I couldn’t bear to see her in.
Within two months, I made the next hard decision to shake things up yet again to regain something that had been lost. I was not willing to let my daughters continue having their spirits stifled. The day I toured a different school and watched children gather around us with genuine excitement and joy, I knew I’d found what my daughters needed. From their first day there, I saw the shift back to the children I knew they were: excited, confident, growing.
My oldest daughter, always incredibly intuitive even as a little girl, stepped into the gap with determination. She was ready to try her hardest to see us all do well, helping her sister with those endless hours of homework while I worked to understand the business I was in the process of purchasing and questioning that choice along the way. My husband’s calls grew shorter and more distant. By the time we were all wrapping up for the day, it was time to sleep and start the cycle again.
But my oldest was struggling with her own displacement. She stayed strong for me on the outside, only briefly mentioning that her classmates were cliquey, that this small-town environment felt foreign to her big-city spirit. There was a reluctance in her spirit, in her presence. She seemed unsure of everything. Eventually, she asked about e-learning options to “wrap things up” and move on to the next stage. She was looking for her own way out, trying to find solutions or at least escapes of her own.
The Purchased House
The business consultant advised me to purchase a home, warning it would be harder to secure financing once I owned the business. Our plan was for my husband to transition to Louisiana and help run the business full-time. Following professional advice seemed logical, so I began looking for something manageable.
When I found a house that felt right, my husband made the trip to Louisiana to “look it over.” We didn’t get along at all during his visit. The tension was undeniable, confirming the unsettled awareness that had been growing in me for months. The recognition of an unhappiness I’d felt all along but hadn’t wanted to name.
I don’t want to paint him as a “bad” husband. We had always felt more like friends, which had seemed like enough when we got married and started our family. He was always the person I wanted near me, the one I couldn’t bear to see go. But in this season of crisis, his absence echoed a drift I’d felt for quite some time.
The business itself was proving more complex than anticipated. It was demanding, difficult for a woman with two young children to manage alone, and not practical to hire extensive managerial help. The financing package was still uncertain. Everything seemed to be up in the air.
I started to doubt it all. Traumatic experiences call you from a place deep inside and challenge you to evaluate not just one aspect of life, but all of it. We didn’t have the foundation. That truly spiritually connected thread that could keep us in each other’s sphere during such a challenging time. We were all just coping, moving through motions instead of making choices.
The lack of communication between me and my husband just felt like absence. It felt like we all had just accepted that in the wake of our business adjusting to all the “new experiences and challenges” we were facing. I often wondered what he was going through, but our conversations were so few and far between that it simply wasn’t the topic we covered when we spoke. I look back and realize we must have all just been “coping.”
From the time and distance apart, I began to question my marriage now that I could see it from afar. The lack of substance that was there to make me miss it was screaming at me from the shadows.
The Forced Sale
Then came the necessity to sell the house as part of my divorce proceedings. The home I’d fought to create, the space I’d thought might anchor us all, became part of legal logistics I hadn’t anticipated. I was required to sell, forced into another displacement when I was already struggling to find solid ground.
This wasn’t just about losing a house. It was about losing control, again. About having choices made for me when I was desperate to make choices for myself.
The Pool House
My parents offered their pool house as a temporary solution. It was a generous gesture born of love and concern, and I was grateful for somewhere to land with my daughters. The space was charming in its own way—small but well-appointed, enough room for the four of us if we were very deliberate about our belongings.
My daughters adapted with the resilience that was becoming their superpower, turning the loft into a shared bedroom adventure, making the tiny kitchen feel like a playhouse. But I felt the weight of what this represented: a grown woman with three children, living in her parents’ backyard, wondering how her carefully planned life had led to this moment of such beautiful, heartbreaking dependence.
The stress was relentless, and my parents, despite their good intentions, couldn’t seem to relate to what I was going through. The very people I’d moved “home” to be near couldn’t understand the depth of displacement I was experiencing. The isolation deepened when even family couldn’t bridge the gap to where I was emotionally.
It ended badly. Not through anyone’s fault, but because stress and misunderstanding have a way of amplifying each other. I realized it was best for me to have my own space—not as a temporary measure or someone else’s generous offering, but as my own choice.
The Apartment
That evening when I signed the lease on the small apartment, I knew it would never be featured in any magazine, that it represented nothing I had ever envisioned for myself. But something fundamental had shifted in me. I wasn’t trying to go home again. I was finally ready to come home to myself.
That first evening, as I placed my coffee mugs in those kitchen cabinets with full presence and intention, I felt it—the quiet exhale of recognition. This was mine. Not forever, but for now. And “for now” was enough to begin.
I filled the space with candles because I loved how they made me feel. I played music—whatever matched my mood that day—without asking permission or seeking approval. I cooked my favorite meals, not because they were what I thought I should want, but because they were what I actually craved. I let silence sit with me when I needed it, and cranked up the volume when my soul required it.
For the first time in years, I respected the space around me as my own.
The Understanding
This is when I understood the profound truth that would change everything: one perfect item doesn’t make a home. Connection does. The space between things matters as much as the things themselves. It’s about the art of the finish—not perfection, but the moment someone walks into a room and exhales, thinking: Yes. This is it.
Home was never the place I was trying to return to. Home is the relationship I was learning to create, with space, with myself, with the woman emerging from the chrysalis of change.
Every displacement had been preparing me for this moment of recognition. Every forced move, every loss of control, every temporary space had been teaching me what home actually feels like when you stop trying to find it and start choosing to create it.
I discovered that when you stop trying to go home again and finally come home to yourself, magic happens. Your space becomes a mirror. Your choices become ceremony. Your daily rituals become devotion to the woman you’re brave enough to become.
The mirage of home I’d been chasing finally dissolved, revealing something far more beautiful: the truth that I had been carrying home with me all along.
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