Literary Mama Rewind: Home

Welcome to Literary Mama Rewind! Every few weeks we’ll round up some of our favorite essays, stories, poems, columns and reviews from the Literary Mama archives relating to a particular theme. Home is where the heart is. Home is not a place, it’s a feeling. There’s no place like home. Is home a building? An emotion? A person? Today’s selections from the archives explore what the idea, and reality, of home truly is.

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  The Neighbor by Marci G. Schur in Creative Nonfiction
  “You wait for me, Mommy, right?” “Of course,” I reassure her. “I’ll be waiting for you to come home. I promise.” I kiss her all over her face, wishing I could swallow her, make her invisible to him.

• The Fixer-Upper by Danita Berg in Creative Nonfiction
  I didn’t hate the ex’s taste: brown and greens she’d try to insert into Jeff’s preferences of greys and blacks. Still, the house didn’t feel like home. “You need to find a place with your own energies if you want this to work,” my friend Lisa said. But Jeff came from moderate means, was supporting two children, paying alimony, and barely scraping by. He couldn’t afford to buy anything else…

• Long Ago, Home by Lynn McGee in Poetry
  Childhood, that sleepy season, hovered at the ceiling.

• Home, I Say by Ona Gritz in Poetry
  So many mistakes I can make, and I do.

• Home is Where the Revolution is: Two Fresh Takes on Domesticity by Erin Walter in Reviews
  Thank god, then, for an unexpected indie book that fell into my lap just when I needed it. Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture helped me rethink my new role as a full-time mother and connect the choices in my home life to the challenges facing the outside world.

• Home Fires by Erin White from the Column The Hen House
  I know now why Chris goes to the fire. All day she has been away from home, away from me and from her children and all day she has been tending to us in the most abstract way. She has worked — she has talked on the phone, typed on the computer, negotiated around conference tables — to make money so that we can have a good life. Now she is home and she wants to do something straightforward, something elemental.

• Home by Elrena Evans from the Column Me and My House
  This time, as my pregnancy has progressed and I’ve watched my daughter and son together, I didn’t expect to feel these feelings again. I know beyond all possible doubt that what we have gained is more than what we lost, if indeed we lost anything at all.

• Homecoming by Heidi Vornbrock Roosa in Fiction
  You sing her to sleep. The first night, you sing the same three lullabies again and again while she cries. Stroke her hair, sing again. She sleeps, then wakes herself, wills herself awake, cries to find you.
  Not her mother. You sing more. When she sleeps, you creep out, sigh. Sleep yourself, and when she cries next, you find her standing in the dark hallway, which way to go? And so you sing some more.