This space of great import.

Photo: A version of home. Taken by me.

I often return to this idea of home.

It has been a complicated relationship from the start for someone like me - woman, brown, young.

There was often this nagging sensation that home, the land, was not really made for people like me. No matter how far and wide I travelled, no matter the seasons and the flavours of food, the experiences of being othered would bubble up, one often mirroring another.

That as a woman, home - of brick and mortar - was less a safe space and more of a battlefield, between ideals and expectations, between the self and society. Even today, where women have more rights (see that I do not say equal rights) and more access to resources, and have made something of themselves, they are relegated to more traditional roles at home. In a home, the woman is the proprietor, not necessarily of the property itself, but of all the responsibilities that come with having a physical space, a family.

Here, I must digress, to reach for a memory that always makes me laugh, because it is a little comic, but mostly tragic. Near where I live with my husband, there is a grocery store where we can place our orders through WhatsApp. Often, when my husband sends in our grocery order for the week, the reply on the other end is - “Thank you, Ma’am”. No questions asked, no assumptions questioned - if a grocery order is being made, then it must be a woman who is doing it. My husband tells me each time this happens, each time I laugh despairingly because, while we have moved, made strides, often we are still here, still here.

Needless to say, this idea that the physical home is a woman’s domain chafes me—not because I find it demeaning (I believe it is a great honour in its own right)—but because it has not let up for women elsewhere. A woman needs to learn how to provide and nurture, to have her cake and eat it, and often, it becomes impossible to do everything, everywhere, all at once.

I suppose I have my parents to thank for my contrarian nature.

I have grown up seeing my mother work as hard as my father to bring in money for the family. I have also seen my father work as hard as my mother to ensure that our home is clean, the cat is fed, the plants are watered. Both my parents are equally, democratically, terrible in the kitchen, which was both comically delightful and a little depressing growing up (especially when I could see all these other kids I went to school with having such nicely packed lunches from home). So my home, at least the one I grew up in, seemed like a fair place, where life looked as equal it could be.

But beyond those doors, as I grew older, I soon realised that it was not always like that.

With age came other complications too.

The microdynamics of living in my mother’s home as an adult shifted tremendously after I returned from a stint away. There is something about a mother-daughter relationship that reaches its nadir when two grown women live in 70 sqm of space. Once again, I blame this on society, that pits mothers and daughters against each other by turning the home into a minefield of mismatched expectations.

Purchasing a home for yourself is not really an easy feat in the land I live in, either. Owning your own residential property is A Really Big Deal. A marker of success or a natural progression of events when a (heterosexual) woman or man finds their partner and gets married. Get the house before you get married please, because, you get more government support for your property purchase. But if you’re single, or if you fall between the income brackets, then the process becomes a real ordeal.

So, in a nutshell: home equals a lot.

It is definitely far more than the structural fixtures, the themed renovations and the picture perfect Instagram shots of light falling just so.

Because despite all the complications around this idea of a home and what that means for a woman like me, I have held fast to an extremely romantic, almost impractical idea - that my home is a sanctuary.

For those of us who have never felt safe or comfortable in our skin, this space is of greater import.

Having a home embodies progress but not of the material variety; it indicates a deep and abiding faith - in oneself, perhaps in one’s relationships if making a home is a joint venture - that you are ready and willing to do something for yourself that you believe you deserve, that no one else has ever done for you before. It’s also an exercising of a right, of claiming a stake in the land that you’re inhabiting, an embodiment of permanence for those of us who have drifted endlessly from one space to another.

Then, there is also a deeper truth. That home is often both a feeling and a place, sometimes more of one than the other. I have seen homes being created out of nothing but oh my, the feeling of safety, the joy, the contentment. I have seen homes created with everything and yet, remain hollow, one-dimensional, static. I have seen people desperately try to make homes of others (I have been there myself) and witnessed how much pain and sadness that can bring. I have seen people make homes in themselves, filling themselves with deep gratitude, a timeless rooting.

I am still in the process of building my home. I think it will remain an iterative one. The home that I am seeking in my own body, that has gone through more than I could have imagined in the last few years. The external home, the feeling that I am constantly working with my husband to create in the physical spaces we inhabit. A deeper connection with land, my land, but also the land at large, which continues to feed, nurture, gift us in indescribable ways.

But also, to understand that often, feelings and things—homes of bodies and mind and spaces—are ephemeral. Because time in this human vessel remains short, fleeting. To hold, but never too tight. And when necessary, to let it go as needed.