We moved a lot when I was a kid. By the time I was eleven, we had moved that many times. Sometimes it was just a few doors up the lane and other times it was to a new town hours away.

It’s amazing how permanent or transient life can feel, and how you can adapt to changes in living conditions. As a kid, you follow your parents; you cross each new threshold in their footsteps. I’ve lived in a number of different kinds of homes, in my grandfather’s fifty year-old house in the middle of a city, in a brand new mobile home in the middle of 77 acres of brush and cow pastures, in three different motels along busy trucking routes, and in rental row housing where your neighbours are just a few inches away on the other side of a wall.

Wherever we lived, we didn’t own our home, we rented it. Each residency could last for months or years. I usually watched life unfold on the ground floor, at the lower-end of the middle-class. I had my own room for the first time at the age of eight, but a couple of years later, we were living in a motel and I had to share a bedroom. I wouldn’t have my own bedroom again till a few years later.

When you can’t have private personal space, you end up cultivating the space you need in your mind. When I was ten, I shared a bed with my Dad, and while he was sleeping, I’d listen to 14CFUN on my transistor radio with a little plastic earphone. My private late night AM radio took me into a wider world where KISS sung a ballad to Beth and Boston power-chorded their way through more than a feeling. Escapism helped to bring my kid-brain some much-needed psychological privacy and personal space. I don’t know how much I really liked my parents or my life back in those days, but I’m pretty sure I resented all chaos and uncertainty. Any chance to escape was refreshing.

I have wondered if impermanence or mobility had been kind of baked into my parents, carried over from their own upbringings. For me and my sister, our relatively transitory housing was driven by the kinds of circumstances that my parents were in. Our mother’s mental illness and father’s alcoholism must have made it difficult for them to save money or create permanence and stablility, but maybe there were older patterns at play too. Maybe ownership wasn’t even a consideration for them. Although Grandpa Love, my Dad’s dad, had built the Love family house in Prince Rupert back in 1918, my Dad never seemed followed in his father’s steps into home ownership.

I’ve wondered over the years if home ownership would have changed our family for the better. As far as I can tell, my Dad had always been a renter and none of his jobs ever laster more than a few years. Maybe he actually liked moving around every so often. Whether that was his nature or not, it wasn’t all on him. Every few years, my Mum would have a nervous breakdown or Dad would lose his job or something, and we’d have to move somewhere new and kind of start all over.

I believe that to my Mum, her real home would always be in her hometown of Victoria, where her father lived, and where she’d spent most of her life. Mum’s dad had been a Mountie and they’d moved a fair bit during her youth as the family followed him from post to post around British Columbia. Maybe in her first eleven years, she changed home as many times as I would. She and her parents settled in Victoria sometime in the mid-forties.

A Nesting Instinct

By the time I was a teen, we were renting a townhouse in East Van. I had my own room again for the first time in a few years and it was like heaven to me. We lived there through my last two years of elementary, and all through high school. By that time, I’d collected a vast collection of books, magazines, and comics, and had my own second-hand TV and a clock radio in my room, so my entertainment was self-contained and assured. I think I was trying to equip my own apartment, to define my own living space, and set up some amount of self-sufficiency. Home didn’t always feel secure or totally safe, but at least my room was mine.

When I turned 29, my wife and I were able to buy a condo in East Van, very near to the neighbourhood where she’d grown up. Ownership was a big step for us. The responsibility scared me,  but we’d gone into it together, talked it all out, and worked hard to save up our down payment.  We bought our condo pre-built, and drove by the site every week to watch the construction progress of our future home.

On move-in day, it felt so amazing to be moving into a brand new place that nobody had ever lived in before. I can still smell the new carpet and paint, and see the bright walls and shiny fixtures. There was no evidence of age anywhere: no dust, no stains, no scratches, no dented corners, no musty, mouldy aromas, no dry-rot, and no old, second-hand furniture that’d been in someone’s family for thirty years. Everything was new, and it felt like a total housing reboot.

However, our dream condo turned sour as it revealed its substandard underbelly to us so many times over the years. Starting just a few months after moving in, we discovered that we lived in a leaky condo, but we stuck it out through leak after leak, levy after levy, and more than a couple of insurance claims, hoping that each repair event would be the last. Now, twenty-eight years later, after a leak into our bedroom caused by old, degraded membrane outside, we finally decided we’d had enough of annual repairs, and should use our home’s value to find a newer condo with better-quality construction.

But even with leaks, plumbing problems, and all the other issues in our original condo, it has still been my home for almost thirty years, and of that relative permanence, I still feel very proud indeed.