Home Is My Childhood: Finding Home, Feeling at Home?

I started to write this essay below before our class discussions, but the readings brought me back to it. Writing about displaced Colombian women, Whitson et al. describe memory as “constantly lived and re-lived in and through a body made meaningful by place and experience” (2024, p. 2). I think of the fear that still sits in my chest. I have left places. I have crossed borders. But I still count money. I am still on guard. The past has not stayed behind. Somewhere in it is what I call home. Yet I have never quite felt at home.

Who am I? Where is my home? Who is my home? What is my home? Where am I?

My parents and I returned home from a walk. Grandma meets us. She is in a good mood. The room is very light, the TV is on. There is a documentary about animals on TV - little lion cubs. I am happy because we bought expensive pasta and delicious cookies. This rarely happens, so it brings me indescribable pleasure. The apartment is warm, but outside it is freezing.

I had to say goodbye and leave so often. I was born in a small town on the Volga river. It was the 90s, when everything in the country was unstable. The collapse of the USSR, the transition to a market economy, vouchers, financial pyramids, foreign goods, Bush's legs ^[1]... I was little, but I remember that time well. Most of the country was left without money. People were not paid for six months, they had to leave and find a normal job, but there was no way to do so. There was nowhere to go. The enterprises were closing. Former doctors, professors, doctors of science, researchers went to the markets to sell their belongings. There was nothing to eat.

First grade. Classes are over. I go down from the second floor to the school hall. There are a lot of parents there – they are greeting their children. I am trying to find my mother. I see light-colored hair. It stands out like a bright spot in the middle of the gray crowd. It is my mother’s hair. She waves to me, and I wave at her. We leave the school. Golden autumn. We walk home. Yellow leaves under our feet. It is very warm.  

Tanks and troops on Manezhnaya Square in Moscow. August 19, 1991. Andrey Solovyov / TASS

When I was born, my mother had just graduated from university – she was supposed to become a doctor, a person who has a good salary, who is respected in society. As she always said, they were the only people who wore leather coats – coats that most people in the country could not afford. I was born during the coup ^[2]. My mother recalled that when she was in the maternity hospital, the TV showed tanks in the center of Moscow. I was born on August 13, 1991. After this date, the life of the country split into "before" and "after". Doctors who used to wear leather coats became those whose salaries are still among the lowest in the country.

My grandmother and I are walking home. I have just finished my classes at a music school. I have a violin in my hand. It is late evening. The streets are illuminated by lantern light. The class went well – the teacher praised me. We are chatting with my grandmother: something about school. We go into a delicatessen and buy puff pastry. This is our tradition. I like it when we buy puff pastry. I never had this as a child. 

A flea market in the 1990s. TASS

My grandmother, who later became a Veteran of Labor ^[3], worked as an engineer all her life. She built airplanes. She earned good money, but in 1991 their enterprise was closed. A highly skilled design engineer with years of experience, she suddenly found herself assembling fluorescent lamps. The money she made bought us butter. My father is a year younger than my mother. The year I was born, he was finishing university, studying to become a lawyer. There was nothing to eat. Nearly a certified lawyer, my father stood at the market, trying to sell three clocks from home. No one bought them. They sat in our apartment for years until my mother threw them away – she didn’t want to be reminded of that time.

Loud music is playing. Bright lights illuminate the skating rink. Evening. Lots of people around me. I must be nine or ten pm. I am skating with my classmates, but I don't remember them. I only remember myself and the music. A foreign artist. Some hit from the 2000s. I don't know English, so I can't understand the lyrics. The only meaning is in the rhythm and melody. Winter. Snow everywhere. But I am warm because I am skating.

Meanwhile, criminals were rapidly spreading across the country. My generation still has a set of phrases deeply embedded in our minds: "When you enter a building, look around, make sure no one is coming in after you," "Be careful when you enter an elevator; if someone runs in after you, run out immediately," "Don't show anyone your house keys or money – they can snatch them from your hands and run away," "Don't go near gypsies – they are dangerous." Then the Chechens started kidnapping children. They took them to Chechnya and demanded ransom, and if the relatives didn't send money, they would mail the children's severed fingers. This was because of the of the Second Chechen War, which broke out in 1999^[4].

I am sitting in a chair. It is evening. I am reading a book – "The Living and the Dead" by Simonov. It is a book about war. I am eleven years old. My mother says that this book is not for my age, but I like it. I started reading early. I want a war to begin. War seems so romantic. I will go to the front right away. I want to be an infantryman. I am overwhelmed with excitement. The floor lamp is on, casting a dim light across the room.

Clearing the rubble following the explosion in an apartment building on Guryanova Street in Moscow. September 9, 1999. Profimedia

Explosions of buildings across the country. My grandmother was watching the evening news and crying as the screen showed footage of rescuers carrying out lifeless infants in their arms. Hostage crisis at the Dubrovka Theatre Centre^[5]. Negotiations with the terrorists. The assault. Within minutes, dozens of people collapse unconscious in ambulances. Putin banned negotiations with the terrorists and allowed the use of gas. The gas that will later kill the hostages – dozens of innocent people.

I am sitting in the theatre. My grandmother and I are at the opera again. We often choose opera because we prefer it to ballet. There are not many people in the theatre. The opera is long – Verdi’s "Aida." I know that my classmates are skating right now. But I like being here. I love music and spending time with my grandmother.

This is my childhood. I cannot say that it was happy. I learned not to ask for anything – I knew my parents had no money. That is when I first felt a nagging fear for my life. Fear – that is the word, the feeling that defines my childhood. Fear of poverty, of criminals, of injustice. Fear that still sits deep in my chest. And yet, my home is my childhood. It is the memory of what once was. It was painful, but it was mine. My home is my memory.

At sixteen, I left home. I moved to Moscow and never returned. In Moscow, I had a home, but it never felt like home. Fifteen years later, I left Russia. Armenia… A beautiful country with warm, hospitable people. A place of rich wine, flavorful meat, and beautiful mountains. But Armenia never became my home. It became a place where I would always be welcomed, fed, offered a drink – but never truly belong. Two years in the U.S.… Could this country become my home? I don’t think so.

My home is something intangible. It is my memory – woven from fragments of the past. A few happy moments, so many sorrowful ones. Yet, it is my home. The home that lives in my mind.

Who am I? Where is my home? Who is my home? What is my home? Where am I?

When I call my childhood home, I am speaking about what formed me. My character. My fears. The person I became. But being shaped by a place has never quite meant feeling at home there. In “Homeplace,” bell hooks describes how Black women created spaces of care and resistance under racist oppression. “There we learned dignity, integrity of being,” she writes (1990, p. 41). I keep returning to those last words. Integrity of being. I think of my mother and grandmother. Of the love I felt with them. What did those moments give me? What did they allow me to hold on to, growing up with so much fear? The poverty and unpaid wages of the 1990s were there in our apartment. In the clocks my father could not sell. In the money my grandmother earned for butter. In my understanding that I should not ask for anything. And still, there was music. There were walks together. There was love. These moments helped me feel good when so much around me was frightening. Now they bring nostalgia and an aching sadness for the child I was. They formed me, too. But the fear remained.

Cresswell writes that home is “an ideal as well as a place” (2004, p. 115). I have had places to live. I have moved from one to another. I have never quite been able to make that feeling mine. Leaving Russia because of the war means that I cannot return in the foreseeable future. But even when I imagine returning, I do not know where I would go. My home is in my memory. It belongs to a time I cannot return to. Kellett and Moore write: “Home is both an imposed ideal and a potent cultural and individual ideal, which can both inspire and constrain us” (2003, p. 128). I wonder whether my search carries an expectation that somewhere, eventually, I should feel at home. That finding it would help me put myself together. Yet when I call my childhood “mine,” I am speaking about what formed me. My character. My fears. The person I became. Does knowing what formed me give me something to hold on to, even if I cannot call it belonging? I know that this past is mine. I still do not know where my home is.

Can we find a sense of coherence in our lives if we do not feel at home anywhere?

 

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^[1] Author’s Note: The nickname for chicken drumsticks imported from the USA, common in the post-Soviet space. ↩

^[2] Author’s Note: The August Coup (also known as the August Crisis of 1991 or the 1991 Coup) was an attempted coup d'état in the Soviet Union in August 1991, one of the key events that preceded the collapse of the USSR. ↩

^[3] Author’s Note: A state award of the Soviet Union, established by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on January 18, 1974, to honor workers, collective farm workers, and employees for long-standing conscientious labor. ↩

^[4] Author’s Note: Part of the counterterrorism operations in the North Caucasus region – military operations and counterterrorism activities in Chechnya and the bordering regions of the North Caucasus. ↩

^[5] Author’s Note: The Dubrovka terrorist attack was a hostage crisis that took place at Dubrovka in Moscow, starting on October 23 and lasting until October 26, 2002. During the event, a group of 40 armed Chechen militants, led by Movsar Baraev, seized and held 912 hostages, including staff, spectators, and the cast of the musical "Nord-Ost," for three days inside the building of the Theatre Center. ↩