Be(longing)

What does it mean?

Today I was sitting in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne. Newcastle is my nearest city, and it was the closest city to where I used to live as a child. It is the city where one of my daughters goes to school. But it is not a city that has ever felt like home.

It is the city that my ex-husband moved to when our marriage ended, and for a while that was enough to make me not want to befriend it. But years later it still doesn’t feel like a place where I really belong.

‘The word ‘Belong’ comes from the Old English word langian, which forms the root of ‘longing’. It means a sense of powerful emotional attachment to ‘my place’, where I am ‘at home’, and implies a sense of permanence.’

I came here today because I had to pick up my daughter from a hockey practice at 5pm, and to make the most of the 70-mile round trip from our home in North Northumberland I found something educational to do with the younger two girls. That is often what learning outside school looks like when you are a single parent whose children have varying and complicated needs. Our days are sewn together like patchwork squares, a mess of different shapes and colours and speeds and emotions. Somehow we all muddle along, our different desires and feelings woven through like cotton threads.

This exhibition explored ‘Belonging’. Earlier this morning we sat around the table in the little room that leads from our kitchen, the room I painted yellow a couple of months ago to imitate sunshine. My two little daughters and I took out our big A3 art books and each chose a coloured felt tip, writing ‘Belonging’ in green, pink or blue in the middle of our blank pages. Then I asked the girls what belonging meant to them, and we chatted and wrote our thoughts down. It emerged that the 12yo often felt more likely to belong in imaginative worlds, which didn’t surprise me but is also a little bit sad when you think about it. We had identified feeling safe and understood as important aspects of belonging, and she has often had to retreat into her head to experience that. I am pleased she has that outlet, but unhappy that the real world can be such a hostile place for her.

In the car on the way down the A1 the air around us was smudged with heavy rain and the windscreen wipers were working hard. The girls were drawing in the back seat and I was listening to Amy Liptrot being interviewed by Annie McManus on her Changes podcast. Annie asked Amy where she considers to be home, and Amy replied that her heart is at home in Orkney, where she grew up. It was formative, she explained, although she calls her house in Yorkshire home now too.

I cast my mind back to winding roads in Devon, the county where I spent my primary school years, where the hedgerows towered above me while I picked wild strawberries. I remember the stone cube that was wedged at the side of the road, the old milk churn stand that I used to climb on. The distant sight of Dartmoor on the horizon. As I steer away from puddles at the side of the road and spray from lorries splashes against my car, I try hard to imagine that Devon is the place that feels like my home. It is, after all, the place that I lived from the age of three to eleven But those eight years don’t seem to be imprinted into my DNA in the way that Amy described.

Perhaps North Yorkshire is my home then, the place where I belong. Those were the years I started to shed the child, develop a mind of my own before moving south. And it’s true that the nostalgic sensation I sometimes feel when I think about my teenage years is a bit like belonging, but it’s not quite the same. I don’t belong there.

‘All my life
I have been restless –
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss –
than wholeness –
than staying at home.
I have not been sure what it is.’

From Whelks by Mary Oliver

I did feel like I belonged in London in my twenties. So many millions of the people who lived there were not really ‘from’ London, so I didn’t feel that I stood apart as an outsider. We were all outsiders, and I wore my otherness fairly comfortably.

For now, my sense of belonging is definitely tied up with the longing. I am not convinced that I will ever feel that a physical place is my home, especially if, as Amy Liptrot suggests, home is connected to the place where we are formed as children. In many ways I feel that I am still forming. And where I belong is confused by the people I love. As my daughter wrote on the sheet of paper in the photo above, ‘I feel like I belong with Mummy.’ I am their home and they are mine. But I am also a woman beyond that home, and I’m still trying to unravel who that woman is and where she belongs.

Later this week I’ll be doing a video post for my paid subscribers. I’ll be discussing how I’m approaching the challenge of meeting the deadline for my second book amongst all of the caring and the mothering. I know this is a topic of interest for many of my readers from the messages I receive- I find so much support and solidarity in the community of creative carers on Substack.

This will be the first in a series of videos I’m recording - I hope you’ll join me for the ride…