It's a complicated situation with a complicated history, but one of the things I've noticed lately is how out of place he always seems when I talk to him. He went back to help care for a family member. It's supposed to be a temporary situation. As in a couple-to-three-years temporary. But originally when he pulled out, two days before my birthday, I felt like he was ready to be back "home" because he seemed a little too eager to leave. Now, I'm not so sure he knows where home is. I never sensed he felt it was Pittsburgh. He always felt a little outside of the Pittsburgh crowd. And he wore that "otherness" as proudly as I had when I lived in Texas. His moniker in a football column I wrote for a while was "Cowboy Fan Hubby". He knew that's what I called him, and he liked it. He wore a Super Bowl XXX t-shirt to Steelers training camp. No one said anything, but they sure did stare, and I noticed the reception we got was unusually cold. And I was SO sure he was going to get us at least assaulted if not worse at the Steelers-Browns game the season before last (the one where James Harrison knocked Colt McCoy into another time zone) when he got a little too vocal about being unreservedly not a Steelers fan.
Despite that, he liked it here, but like one tends to like their favorite vacation spot. It was new and unique (he had never lived outside of Texas). He became, rather quickly, both a Pens fan and a Pirates fan. But never, ever a Steelers fan. If anything, his dislike of them worsened once he landed here. I always thought it was because the rest of us are so immersed in the team that it tends to be smothering. Early on, I met a young man who explained he was a Packers fan even though he was born and raised here just as a rebellion to having the Steelers jammed down his throat growing up. I think my husband felt the same way. But a city is far more than the sum of its sports teams, and there is a lot to love about Pittsburgh. I tried to introduce him to all of it that I had discovered myself. We discovered still more together. And he would seem to like a lot of it, yet there was always something... He used "they" and "you" a lot when talking about the city. Like he was apart from us. Particularly when discussing something he didn't like - usually either political or Steelers-related.
I understood it. I had literally spent decades in the same mind-set after all. And he was naturally torn. For one thing, the rest of his family was back in Texas. Now he's back with them, but he's left a big part of his family here. So he's conflicted yet again - or, rather, still. He can't win no matter what he does or where he goes. That's hard.
I confess that I worried when he made the decision to go back that people would think we should have pulled up stakes and gone with him. There were a lot of practical reasons why it wasn't a consideration, but the truth of the matter is that I never seriously considered moving for any reason. This is my home now.
But that's the question I've pondered since summer when he left: how does one define "home"? Is it a place? Or is the people who populate that place? When I lived in Texas people always used to tell me it was the latter. When it came down to it, I chose the former and let my poor husband go back by himself. And I left him in some sort of "state" where he's not really belonging to either Texas or Pennsylvania. He's living, for now, in the State of Flux.
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| Does this define home... |
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| ...or does this? |
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