MIND MOVES: The sale of the family home of origin is more than a monetary transaction. It is an emotional event.
It is one for which people usually find themselves psychologically unprepared: which is why so many adults are surprised by how sad they feel when the family home is put up for sale. The psychological effect of the sale of the home does not feature much in the literature of life-cycle family transitions, which require preparation, support and resolution.
But it should. Because the emotions for adult children that accompany the sale of "their" family home are often surprisingly intense. The house into which you were born, in which you grew up, where attachments were imprinted, memories embossed, childhood conducted, adolescence encountered and adulthood first ventured is the emotional storehouse of one's personal narrative and family history.
Selling this home is often experienced as akin to erasure of one's former self, or at least the location in which one's earlier self was formed.
Home is more than a house. The family of origin house is the ultimate home. Always referred to as "home", regardless of travel, time, distance or circumstances it is a place one may depart from but never leave. It is a place that must be vacated voluntarily, with right of return in times of trouble and triumph. It is the place one is "from".
Perhaps this is why severance from the family home of origin brings such trans-generational psychic angst, that it continues even across extensive geographical and time lines. This may be why, for example, millions of Americans, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, descendants of emigrants whose rupture with their Irish home place was painful, feel compelled to return to Ireland on their behalf.
Because regardless of where one creates subsequent homes, the family home of origin remains the descriptive starting point for one's story of one's life. Where you are from is where you grew up and perhaps one remains a "blow in" elsewhere forever.
The family home is, therefore, more than a place. It is a state of mind. Those with unhappy memories of it rarely leave them behind and those with happy childhood memories return to its psychological asylum ever after. Archive of the past, eidetic storehouse of images, of grandparents when they were alive, of one's parents when they were lithe and young, brothers and sisters through babyhood and childhood, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and family pets in their former manifestations: the family home houses these psychological phantoms. They roam our lives with their presence, provide psychological continuity, an arc from past to present, a continuum of connection from the present into the future.
Cradle of consciousness and developmental domain, the family home contains our first selves, our pre-verbal perceptions, the ground upon which first steps were taken, the place where the diminutive details of childhood observation were made, site of sibling relationships, seminal memories and the wandering ghosts of our own childhood selves.
It is in the family home that every time we return with Proustian passion we rediscover our most meticulous memories. We remember the crack on an ornament, the odd chipped china cup in the press, the repetitive pattern of wallpaper counted nightly as accompaniment to sleep and waking and wakefulness.
We remember the line on a ceiling, depth of wardrobe, fragrance of linen, the softness of a pillow, the sheen and silkiness of a quilt, the tickle of candlewick, the hang of curtains, fragrance of cushions, mustiness of books and the texture of couch. The murmur of voices, the tedium of homework, the ritual of evening, drawing of curtains, scraping of chairs, the rotation of records when their sound was spent, the buzz of transistor, the televised anthem at close of evening, the household creaks and squeaks, noises of a past life.
Who can forget the stirring of morning, smell of porridge, slants of light measuring the day, the path through the garden and the mysteries it contained, the activity of life? Archive of our first imaginings and our most visceral reflections, the family home's shapes, sounds and smells infuse our psyche and allow us, every time we return, to renew our senses with these visions and voices from the past.
The family home, therefore, is an emotional abode. It is a psychological province. It hallmarks its occupants with an indelible identity. This is home. This is what made and shaped you. Site of conception, cradle of childhood, springboard of adulthood, while the family home remains, the past is preserved.
But it cannot remain forever. How it is bequeathed or sold, when and why may determine the emotional response its sale evokes. When the childhood home comes under the hammer, a blow is struck in the heart of grown adults that is akin to being abandoned and orphaned.
The family feuds that so often erupt, surprisingly, inexplicably and intensely, are rarely about money or about a house, but about being cherished, about finality, sale of the past, irretrievability of that time, inability to change it or retain it, finality and about how much one was loved in that place long ago.
Marie Murray is director of psychology, St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview.