Thanks for the link to the earlier thread. In my case, my parents’ house didn’t feel like home to me even when I was living there.
I hated when I was younger and people asked whether I lived at home. Where else would I live? Now I am annoyed by adults who refer to their room, which I assume means their bedroom. I’m grown up. All the rooms are mine.
I have always thought of my apartment as temporary, even though we have lived in this building for almost eleven years. It’s home, but not forever-home.
My home is where I live. I once lived in my car. It was a POS car and it was really cold at night. It was my home.
Home is where, when I come through the door, I automatically relax.
That includes places where I’m by myself and places where I’m with others. And it stops including some of those places when certain people happen to be there.
I travel for long lengths of time in the course of my job, usually from 10 months to a couple of years (next one is three years!). Although at the end of a 12 to 16 hour day we’ll say, “it’s time to go home,” we all understand that it’s not really home. Our homes are in Michigan. A hotel room or a corporate apartment can be cozy, but it’s not permanent, and it’s definitely not our own.
My next assignment (the three-year one) has international move counselors, and one of the things that they stress over and over and over again is that one of our first objectives should be to make the rental house into a true home. And you know what? I get it, man.