We visited Suzannah for Fall Family Weekend, and it was wonderful. It's only been a month, but I have missed her so much. I'm still not used to walking past her empty (and strangely tidy) room. I'm not used to not hugging her every day, or before bed. Hugging her again -- she gives great hugs -- was my favorite part of the weekend.
"You're doing great," I whispered as I hugged her good-bye last Sunday.
"I'm doing okay," she replied.
And I told her that one month into her first year of college, especially considering everything she's fought through to arrive at this place, okay is more than enough. When I think about the last couple of years, those terrible post-Covid years layered with additional trauma -- some of which I recognized and some of which I didn't at the time -- my gratitude for what we have now brings me to my knees. We did the best we could with what we knew at the time, and some of it was good enough and some of it wasn't but it brought us to this moment, where my firstborn baby adult wants to spend time with us, where she checks in every day, where she misses our hugs and can't wait to come home.
I'll take that. Every time.
*
I've written about home a lot, both in this space and in many others. It's a loaded word for me. I was born into senseless privilege, really; my childhood bedroom still exists in pretty much the same state I left it an entire adulthood ago. I have always loved the way my parents' house in Bozeman smells when I walk through the door, even decades after I left. I love everything about it: the sound of the creek through the open window in my old bedroom (where my children now sleep when we visit), the light over the kitchen sink at night, the sound of the water singing through the pipes when the shower starts, the way I still know where to reach for cereal or crackers or peanut butter. The deer that strut across the lawn at twilight. The shadows that spill over the Hyalite foothills.
I didn't interrogate this privilege for a long time. I've always had a home base: somewhere to return to. And I took it entirely for granted.
*
How many homes can a person have?
I have never once regretted moving to Washington. I've lived here for my entire adult life; we've chosen to raise our family here, and I can't imagine choosing to leave. I have the water and the mountains, and a short drive to the plains I still love as well. I have creative autonomy in my professional life that I absolutely do not take for granted these days. And I live in a state where basic human rights still -- mostly, for now -- remain protected. As a woman and as a mother of a fabulously queer kid and as a human being, this matters.
I love my home state and I always will; it's in my blood. But I also understand that I'm an outsider now. I understood that the day someone from my hometown posted a picture of a car with an out-of-state license place just...driving down Main Street. The message was clear: You're not wanted.
It was a running joke when I lived there in the 90s: No Californians!
The license plate was from a state in the Midwest, though, not California. And I understand that this isn't a joke.
I have an out-of-state license plate and I have since 2001.
Is this a silly thing to pick on? Maybe. But this person happened to post this picture the same summer Ijeoma Oluo -- a writer I think we should all be reading -- faced an intense wave of racist vitriol (death threats, rape threats, vile names I will not type here) when she dared to make the comment "Will they let my Black ass walk out of here?" after visiting a Cracker Barrel in Montana during a road trip with her children. (I've never eaten at a Cracker Barrel, but I do know they had to pay...a lot, for racially discriminatory practices.)
Which brings me to the conversation I had with a student last week.
*
My juniors were working through one of James Baldwin's essays, and I was walking around the room begging them to please just fall in love with the texture and cadence of his perfectly brilliant sentences. They were doing their best to derail my teaching, as teenagers do. But sometimes the derailing leads to conversations that take us where we need to go anyway.
"Winslow, what's your favorite place in the world to visit?"
I was tempted to ask this child what in the world that had to do with the work she wasn't doing, but it was Friday, and I like her a lot, and I didn't really feel like working either.
"Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park," I said. "This has been true for my whole life. If I could only ever go one place again, it would be the shore of that lake. Or swimming in it."
"Where is that exactly?"
"That's in Montana, where I grew up. I love some places in Washington just as much now, so this isn't a fair question, but that's always my first answer."
"I'm not about to set foot in Montana," she said. And she explained in no uncertain terms why.
*
The first time someone I worked with told me about the time they were met with unabashed racism at a restaurant while traveling through my home state, my first response was something along the lines of, "I'm so sorry that happened! That's not Montana!" As a white person in America, I was taught to believe that racism was a reflection of horrible individuals. Horrible individuals are everywhere! An unfortunate reality that doesn't ask anything of us. Because we are not like that.
It's exactly the response I saw from well-meaning Montanans in response to Ijeoma Oluo's experience. How desperately we want to prove we're not like that.
I responded in more or less the same way the second time a friend told me a similar story. A different town, a different circumstance -- but the same story I didn't really want to hear. I wanted to believe in the friendliness and hospitality of my home state. And I do believe in the friendliness, hospitality, and goodwill of individuals in my home state. But it took me some time (the time I had the privilege of taking) to understand that my response -- I'm sorry you encountered terrible people, but that was a reflection of individuals, not a systemic issue -- is exactly how white supremacy sustains itself, how it grows and flourishes, even in our homes, even in our well-meaning hearts.
I remember the first time a student asked me, "Are there any Black people in Montana?" and it led to a conversation similar to the one I had with my student last week. She understood the call towards home; she felt it too, towards a home she hadn't visited in a long time. But she also wondered, rightly so, how I could love a place that wouldn't welcome her too.
I don't love Montana any less than I did the day I left at eighteen, and the day I left for good when I moved to Washington twenty-three years ago. Sometimes I think that the grand sum of my writing, all of it, has always been a love letter to home, whatever that means. It means it's complicated, like any love. It means I think a great deal about home. How privileged I am to have been raised where I was, to love it freely and to feel welcome while I lived there. How privileged I still am to be able to return when I want, to hope my children understand that while they are Washingtonians through and through, Montana and Minnesota pulse through them as well; their roots are deep in all those places. How privileged I am to claim these roots, and to be able to return.
*
Suzannah was always fairly certain she wanted to attend college in-state, though she considered a few Oregon schools; she was quite firm on this from the beginning. She never wanted to go to a red state, for what (I would hope) are obvious reasons. But also, she doesn't want to be too cold or too hot, so no weeks of subzero or intensely hot weather.
"The Pacific Northwest it is, then," I said happily. Because what parent wants her kid to go far away? She had plenty of excellent options and I trusted her to choose what was right for her. But when we visited Western the summer before her senior year, I had a feeling.
Mostly, I want her to know our home will always be home, regardless of where she chooses to put down other roots. I hope it always feels like it.
*
My kid voted in her first election last weekend. Her ballot was delivered to our address, and we took it to her for Family Weekend. After we'd had lunch and made our Target run, we hunkered down in a cafe I've grown to love over the past year. Rain streamed down the windows; Mazzy Star played inside while Suzannah and I sipped coffees in a cozy booth. I wrote in my journal and she spent a long time with her ballot. I've drilled into my children to an irritating degree that local elections matter a great deal; if I've done my job, neither of them will ever say, "I'm not political" or "I'm not into politics," which is, of course, a political statement in itself.
*
I can't see myself living in Montana again; I don't think there's a place for me or my family there anymore. But Montana runs through me, and I still love it fiercely. I love my family there with my whole heart. It's complicated, and it's not.
I've donated to Jon Tester's senate campaign more than once because I still have this wild hope that that a dirt farmer who works the same farm in north-central Montana near my family's farm in north-central Montana (who still uses the same meat grinder that took three of his fingers in an accident when he was only nine) can hang on to the senate seat he's held for so many years in a deep red state, even though he is a Democrat, which is something of a miracle. I've donated because even though Washington is my home now, my heart still claims Montana too, even if it won't claim me back. Because even though Tester and I part ways on some issues, he represents more wild hope that there might still be space for people like me and my family in the place that raised me, even if it's not actually me and my family. Because he works the same land his grandfather homesteaded, because he was a teacher, because he has a gay son, because if I want to ever believe that there is a place for my family in any capacity then I have to believe that some folks in unlikely places will still fight for basic safety and dignity for everyone. Because his opponent is absolutely repugnant and you don't need the news to tell you that; you can hear it straight from the candidate's own mouth. I've donated because people contain multitudes and even though Tester has never been on the ballot with Trump before, which will do him no favors this time, I have to believe it is possible that safety and dignity and decency and empathy can win, even against the odds.
I'm not sure donating to a senate campaign in a state I don't live and can't vote in counts as local politics, but it feels personal.
*
In the meantime, here we are. We're a mess. But also, even when we're a mess, our daily lives are still so full of beauty and love and I hope to never take a second of that for granted, even as I sit with the understanding that I have, in this beautiful life of mine, taken so much for granted.
In the meantime, here I sit, thinking of home. Of the people I love in every home I've ever known. Of all the ways a human heart can break and mend. Of my daughter's hugs and how I miss them, of how lucky I am to know she misses them too. Of the way my son can make me laugh on the darkest days of the year. Of my students and everything they've taught me. Of the friends I've lost and the friends I count as family. Of everything we stand to lose. Of privilege and shortcomings and shortsightedness, of trying to be better, of giving grace, of accountability. Of not knowing where to start, but clumsily trying.
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