35/2025: Another Home

Image © Jose 2025

There is this other house, this other home. It’s another home away from home, though formally my house, I am not sure it is my home, because it is where my son has been living since we bought the house. In so many ways, I did all the rituals that come with buying a house, I even assembled IKEA furniture as I’ve done in all my houses, but this was always going to be where my son would be living, so even the assembly process was four hands on deck. But more importantly, it was the planning, the designing, the solutioning of the house.

We discussed the idea of a table. For me this should sit two to four people, since he is living alone in the house. But he told me he needed a larger table and at least ten chairs. I praised him externally, for his plans to have so many meals with so many guests, while internally questioning how many times he would in fact gather ten people around the table. He explained this wasn’t for meals, but for board games – something that is not a part of my habit or hobby. I still wondered how often that table would be fully opened and busy. Now I have a folder of photos of every time my son has his friends over for board games, and the folder has a lot of photos.

This is just an example. There are things I set in place for a specific usage that he does not use at all, there is a desk in a place I would never place one, there are books, trinkets, memories that are not mine, so this is in fact his home. But in so many ways, and not just because I have my room and my bathroom sort of out of bounds, it feels like my home, but a different home, a shared space that carries no legacy from other people and their past lives, like with my son’s other home where he grew up with his mother. This house was designed to be his home from the start, and it is first and foremost his home, even when his sister comes to stay and while technically this is also her home.

And then there are the smells, the noises associated with his gadgets and appliances (he has an iRobot vacuum cleaner…), the solutions to limit sunlight (to protect the books…), or the way air is allowed to travel through the space. These are all his, his habits, his needs, live signals of a different life, a different way of living. I am not sure this will ever feel completely like my home, and that’s not necessarily an issue because this was never the plan. It is my home because he is there, and in a lot of ways his home is my home. It is not my home for the same reason.

These different homes away from home have made me think about our many homes. It has taken me back to my parent’s homes where my room was my home, temporary houses that were still home, to rooms in other people’s homes that were a home inside a home, to a home for healing I shared with my daughter for eight months, to homes I don’t even remember except the feeling of a comfortable bed at night, or the memory of that window facing the ocean. It makes you understand home as a collection of feelings and experiences that may or may not be repeated but still feel like home at a certain moment. I even remember some hotel rooms that, for a fleeting moment, made me feel at home. Complex or simple, deep or light as a breeze. Home.

P.S. This post was written with pen and paper at a writer’s meetup in Lisbon. My son took me along as a guest. I was among some people who write for a living. After we all sat quietly and wrote in the middle of a large food hall in a public space, I heard some of them read their stories, and it felt wholesome, and I felt quietly privileged.