Home as Conflicted Space

Does home dupe us in the notions of its safety, in assuring us about our impulses for cradling, cocooning, burrowing into that which will never harm us, never turn against us, that which will fortify us against the outside world, serve as our fortress? Or does it really unfailingly protect us from all things harmful just because it's home?

Then why did Anne Frank’s home in Amsterdam and the homes of so many millions of other European Jews prove unsatisfactory as fortresses to protect against the raids, the intrusions, the unfathomable acts perpetrated by the Nazis? (I apologize that I'm invoking Anne Frank to those who think her story is overtold at the expense of others, but that story clearly demonstrates this concept I'm outlining, and since so many people know it, it demonstrates that concept in a way people can picture). Why then did Anne’s family’s home have to be carved out of an attic apartment in an office building, and why again did that presumed fortress ultimately fail? Why, not as in "What could have led to this?" because that we already know, but why, as in "What is it about home that cannot save us from the horrific, cannot fulfill the functions we expect it to?". Is it simply because we imbue the home with expectations it cannot actually meet? Or what? What's the point of a home (the typical meaning of home, the physical kind, on a city block or a plot of land), if it just means being ultimately defenseless? There are so many human rights abuses and social justice issues (forced relocation of towns and villages; gang warfare, which seems usually to rage close to the homes of the gang members themselves and close to the homes of others in their communities and neighborhoods; domestic violence, for instance) that pivot around the home, that reverberate outward from problems at home (even if defined in numerous ways) or from problems at the most basic levels, comparable to the basic nature of the home, those pesky basic needs of nutritious food, abundant water, decent shelter, and adequate clothing. I'd like to explore over time how these spaces, that we expect to be comfortable and harmonious, become otherwise and how they can come back to homeostasis, to equilibrium.

Switching gears here to a different degree of concerns about home as conflicted space, why is the physicality of the home itself also potentially the cause of our deaths? Or, why is the body so fragile? If our bodies are our homes at the most immediate level (perhaps the most immediate level is actually the cell, the genetic code, the atom, the subatomic particle), and we work outward, why do we suffer, and why can it all end with one stroke? Why do freak accidents happen all the time in the home? What's the point of a completely unsecure home, of utter fragility, of the constant threat of breakability? Again, what's the point of being ultimately defenseless?

Our bodies are no protection. We can choke at the breakfast table on a mouthful of Frosted Mini-Wheats. We can dash our hopes and dreams by becoming immobilized, we can fall down from almost any height and falling at a bad angle, paralyze ourselves. We can risk our lives by filling our homes with objects of utility that also pose harms, threats to our safety. Technology seems so helpful until you electrocute yourself, until it catches fire, until it explodes, until it poisons the air you breathe and otherwise poisons the integrity of your body, your organs, your hormones, or even your DNA.

Kitchenwares and other items made of delicate materials such as ceramic and glass seem ever so helpful until they shatter and imbed themselves in skin, or until they start to fall and we feel liable to protect them, salvage them, keep them from injury, and in attempting to keep intact that which refuses to remain intact, to cooperate, we leave ourselves open to great dangers, and the unwieldy objects drop anyway, and in dropping, slice apart our tendons, and nerves, and main arteries, potentially fatal activities starting with simple, trite objects, making the home much more a contested place than it otherwise, harmoniously, appears.

The latter of these countless unfortunate incidents and freak accidents, in which the home ceases to be shelter and works against us, occurred in my home two months ago today. I had just worked my last full day at one of the coolest bookstores in the world, having celebrated my going away with my co-workers and bosses. My boyfriend and I came home sometime around 6 o'clock. I went to go load the pictures of the party and of merchandise (to eventually add to the store's website) onto my computer. Peter brought me a glass of water and then, since we were supposed to be moving across the country at the end of that week, decided, especially since I'd been bugging him about it, to go wash dishes so that he could pack them up. Some time later I hear a loud crash in the next room and think that perhaps it's funny, all kinds of kitchen items toppling in a domino effect. We'd dropped many things in our kitchen before. But before I can assume this is true, I hear Peter screaming my name at the top of his lungs, over the sound of the water, through the barrier of the wall. I throw open the door, and there he is, wide-eyed and gripping his wrist as tightly as possible, a sanguine pool covering the kitchen tile.

Now I'm rushing across the living room, grabbing the phone, dialing 911, running over to his stereo and turning off the music he was blasting to entertain himself while performing monotonous tasks in the kitchen. And now the guy on the other end of the phone is telling me to wrap a clean towel around Peter's hand--and insinuating that this might not have been an accident. A little too early to add insult to injury, don't you think? We're rushing down the stairs of our apartment and waiting for a firetruck to arrive (they always send firetrucks to our neighborhood for emergencies). Peter tells me, "If I pass out, you're going to have to apply pressure to my wrist, or I'll die." Now that I'm beyond sufficiently panicked, the crew arrives, and Peter's talking with them about all sorts of things, the injury, his pain, having them drive me to the hospital, amazingly talkative for being on the verge of death.

At the hospital, though our family and a friend arrive, it's four hours of hell. Peter's joking every moment that the medical students and doctors aren't torturing him. They apparently don't know how to bandage wounds properly and unnecessarily hurt him as they wrap too tightly, unwrap, and rewrap the wound additional times because they can't tell how badly it's damaged. They're ready to go through this tortuous procedure time after time, without either giving him painkillers first or letting the drugs sink in, so we learn early on about the limitlessness of their cruelty. By this point, we'd already assumed (somewhat intuitively) that he'd cut his major artery and nerve and so would need surgery, long before they officially came to the same conclusion and decided on surgery.

He's in surgery for another four hours. Speaking of home, hospitals don't provide much of a home-like atmosphere for family members waiting for their loved ones to emerge from the operating room late at night. Eventually, the doctor comes in and tells us exactly what Peter cut (three quarters of the way through his major artery and median nerve, severing three tendons as well) and how exactly they reconstructed it all (opening the wound up to reveal a kind of triangle, zigzagging the cuts so that now Peter has a mark that makes everyone think of Zorro). When Peter does come bounding by in his hospital bed, we chase after him and his hurried nurse. He's loopy as hell from the drugs but still joking with his nurses. We run through the list of of Peter's medications (he's an amazingly unhealthy young guy) for the millionth time with the nurse, just as we had with the account of the injury (hospitals desperately need better methods of communication, of relaying information, than making the patient provide the same information several times). I stay with Peter while the family goes home for the night, we talk for a little while, and then I fall asleep in the stiff hospital chair. By the afternoon of the same day, we're taking Peter home to his parents' house, where he'll be comfortable, and I'm still dreading having to clean up the kitchen at our home. That night, after dinner with everyone, my friend and I drive to my apartment and attack the floor, the sink, the wall, and other stained areas with bleach. I try to do some other packing, to imagine sleeping the night in my own apartment, but all I can do is talk with my friends online about how shaken up I am. When Peter calls, we decide to have his dad come pick me up because I can't spend the night in my own house.

We set Peter up in occupational therapy to do flexor tendon exercises and delay our trip by about a week, and he starts to recover rather quickly, though one day he reacts strangely to the painkillers, yielding the perennially adorable groggy statement, "I love you...Cheesepuff!" (Cheespuff referring to his special, hospital-provided, bright-yellow foam arm rest). And by now, we've had a chance to talk over the whole ordeal, all the gruesome details. If nothing else, we most certainly know that the plate that broke in half and slid into his wrist just had it out for him. Still, the O.R. report comes back, stating, "He came in with a story of breaking a plate while washing dishes." A story, huh? No one trusts anyone anymore.

Ever since the evil plate enacted its vendetta against my boyfriend (of course the plate didn't actually have any agency; that's why we call it a freak accident--poetic license, thank you), I've been struggling with these notions about home as conflicted space. What meaning does home have on any level, as the code for our gene sequence, as our emotions, as our bodies, as our inhabited spaces, as our journeys, as our friendships, as our attachments, as our created communities, as our planet, if all of it is so fragile and destructible? Why bother creating when it can all be broken away? It's a very paranoiac view of the world, but as I'm still piecing through the trauma of that July night, I've got a lot of paranoia sitting on my shoulders. I don't like ceramic plates and other breakable items. I don't trust objects or very much of anything at all thanks to a very personalized Murphy's Law. How to counter these fearful notions about the home? How to create safety, or a sense of it, in the midst of a conflicted space?