Home Was Not Safe

There was a sound the house made before anything happened. I want you to understand that this is not a metaphor, it is the most literal memory I own. It was the sound of a particular pair of slippers against the corridor tiles, a rhythm slightly faster than normal walking, and by the time I was seven years old, I did not need to see a face to know what that rhythm meant. I would be sitting somewhere, doing something ordinary, homework, or nothing at all, and my body would already be rearranging itself before my mind had caught up. Shoulders drawn in. Breath shortened. Eyes down but alert, the way a small animal watches the grass without appearing to watch it.

I did not have language for this then. I only knew that home was a place where you learned to listen with your whole body, because the volume of the house could change in a second, and there was rarely a warning beyond the footsteps. A meal could become a punishment. A prayer session could become a night you were not permitted to sleep. A question I asked innocently could become the reason I went to bed with my stomach folding in on itself, having eaten nothing since morning, because eating was not a right in my house; it was something I had to earn, or something that was withheld to teach me a lesson I did not always understand.

I am telling you this first, before the theory, before the scripture, before anything else, because I want you to sit inside that boy's body for a moment. I want the sound of the slippers to mean something to you the way it meant something to me. Because if you grew up the way I did, you already know this sound. Maybe yours was a car engine in the driveway, or a particular silence that fell over the house, or the specific way a door was shut. You have your own footsteps. And I promise you, by the end of this book, we are going to make peace with them, not by pretending they didn't happen, but by finally understanding what they meant, and by making sure they stop with us.

The word “home” is traditionally heavy with the scent of lavender, the sound of laughter, and the unmistakable feeling of sanctuary. It is often presented to us as the one place on earth where the world's harshness cannot reach.