Would you like to 'go home again'?

[gsdx]

The saying goes that "you can never go home again", probably because it simply won't feel like the home you remember.

I don't know if I would like to go back to the house I grew up in. It's all changed so much on the outside, I can only imagine how much it's changed on the inside. I'm happy enough with the memories of the way it used to be when I lived there. I'm afraid that going home again would ruin all those memories for me.

 

[S60Turbo]

On a day like today?
HELL YA
Mom, I don't feel well....................lol

 

[josher]

I always enjoy returning to the area I grew up in because I have many family members and friends there. I wouldn't mind moving back there some day.

I'd never want to go back to the house I grew up in. It's changed hands a few times and I'm sure it would be too changed for me to enjoy being there.

The actual phrase (I think from a novel by Thomas Wolfe, but I may be mistaken) doesn't really refer to a house. It's about not being able to return to your youth, to what you were long ago, once life's circumstances have changed you.

 

[RationalLunacy]

I'm back in the same town I lived in thirty years ago. Been there, done that, came back.

 

[Orlandude]

The saying goes that "you can never go home again", probably because it simply won't feel like the home you remember.

I don't know if I would like to go back to the house I grew up in. It's all changed so much on the outside, I can only imagine how much it's changed on the inside. I'm happy enough with the memories of the way it used to be when I lived there. I'm afraid that going home again would ruin all those memories for me.

I would agree. "Home" had more to do with the people (family) at the time and growing up in secure and familiar surroundings. As the old Burt Bacharach song goes..."A House Is Not A Home". People make a "home". A house is just a house.

 

[rgladden]

oh, hell no!

 

[trawler69]

I got dragged up with my 3 siblings in an old rectory with 9 bedrooms, 5 of them being double. My brothers & sister have 6 children between them, they all live close but Mother now lives alone the house. With the house and the cottage there would be plenty of space for everybody and we all get on well except Mother is impossible to live with, we all agree on that, my Dad was resigned to it but I think quite happy to die to get away from it. Don't get me wrong, she is a nice person and we all love her dearly but there is no way any of us could actually live with her in close vicinity. So on the one hand I would love to move back from my nomadic life to be amongst my family again in a great house, we all agree, but it can't happen while mother is there, I am so sad for her, she is her own worst enemy. If she would just compromise a little it would make so much difference.

Woops, sorry, went off on one

 

[smile86]

i've had the same friend with me for almost my entire life, and whenever we both happen to be in London, we like to walk round where we used to live, see our first school, the hairdressers both our mums used to work in. it's a good trip down memory lane, but the place is shittier everytime you go there! i can't go back to the flat i grew up in cos someone else lives there now, but the one my mum owns now is practically identical anyway.

 

[FREDDIE187]

I go back in my mind, but to go back fisically, to the actual house NO!

To think about those times are very nice. In that way, yes I would like to go home again.

 

[Croynan]

Thomas Wolfe wrote a book with that title - " You Can't Go Home Again."

I have never left the city i was born in.

I have moved about 20=25 miles from where i grew up. But the area has changed so, i cannot bare to go back and look at it again.

Except for some fine friends, one of whom i have met via this website and is a great guy, and my doctors there is little that i like about the city now.

Oh yes, i love the Music Center and the Disney Concert Hall.

The city - Los Angeles - has become much too large, over populated, even here in the valley and traffic has become a nightmare.

If i had the choice and guts, i would probably try and move to the east coast to Washington D.C. to be near my closest male friend - a great guy named Dmitriy, who is from the Ukraine. We could never live together but being near each other would be ideal for both of us.

But given the status of things as they are now, i think i shall stay here any my ashes will be placed next to my grandmother's in a lovely setting. She meant the world to me and it will be nice to know that she is near by as will my mother and favourite aunt.

eM.​

 

[herenthere]

Several week ago I went back to my home Country with the intentions of staying there.
I was there about a week, when I realized it was no longer home. I have been in the States too long now, to make a change.
Many of my loved ones are still there, and of course, a ton of memories.
It's very very hard to "go back" we change to quickly.
Seemed like it was nothing, like I had it imagined.

Shaun

 

[momp57]

I visit Mom in the home I grew up in(about 6 hours away). I can't imagine ever living there again. Not so much the house, but the town and the lifestyle. We have a lake house a bit over an hour away where I also spent much of my childhood though, and it might be someplace I could go back to. Right now, I think I'll just stay put.

 

[chillyboi]

i would buy my birth house in a nano second if the $ is right

 

[cocktales]

Hmmmmmmmm,

I think those of you who are in college right now can already see the difference when you go home for a visit after being at school for a while......
I don’t really think that this quite the same as you are using it though. The phrase, as I understand it, refers to the tendency to move away from home and grow in a different direction then you would have had you stayed at home.

When you go back, everyone is still listening to the same music or doing the same things on weekends, or working the same dead end jobs, and you have since discovered different things in life that you feel unable to relate to the people that have stayed in same physical location/frame of mind since you last saw them. Regardless of why it is, the phrase refers to growing away from where you came from, as opposed to growing with.

It is not impossible though, to grow apart from someone/somewhere, and then months/years later come meet back up with similar outlooks once again.

 

[frankfrank]

I always enjoy returning to the area I grew up in because I have many family members and friends there. I wouldn't mind moving back there some day.

I'd never want to go back to the house I grew up in. It's changed hands a few times and I'm sure it would be too changed for me to enjoy being there.

Same here, I'll hopefully be returning to Michigan and Ohio (Ann Arbor-Detroit-Toledo area) for years to come. I always look forward to those trips, but moving back there? Uh-uh. If I'm going to go through the hassle of moving hundreds of miles (or, who knows, maybe even out of the United States), I'm not going to move to another place with miserable winters. I kind of feel that would be pointless.

The "oldest" house that I remember growing up in, if it were to magically materialize exactly where I wanted to move, it would certainly be too small for me, even after subsequent owners having built on to it somewhat. (The two places I remember before that - a rental farmhouse and, before that, a rental flat in the no-longer-existent Willow Run Village, Michigan...do not exist anymore.)

I did visit it about 6 years ago, and had a good time hanging out with the people there for a while. I even mentioned that there used to be a "pull-down" stairway that went up into the attic, where my room was at the time, and how I wouldn't extend the ladder but go up by using a big cabinet that was next to it. (Our cat Mittens, who had an extra toe on each front foot, used to do the same thing, jumping from the cabinet to the un-extended ladder part when he'd come up to see me. As he jumped he always let out this cute, gentle little "Urrr..." sound.) Amazing...when I showed them where it was, the husband looked and noticed there was very faint evidence of an irregularity in the ceiling that he had never noticed before, faintly framing exactly where the pull-down stairs had been.

Oh, and thank you Croynan for sharing your thoughts above - very interesting.

 

[PreTTy PeTe]

our house was great
a two story duplex with this huge balcony
that i loved when i was a kid

after my mom died we sold it
the new owners basically took the soul out of that house
they got ride of the balconey
they stuccoed the house all white
(how weird is that)
got rid of all the fruit trees
the house looks so plain now


so no i can't go home again
it dosen't exist anymore

 

[Scrub]

Yes, I liked the house I grew up in. When looking for a home they just never met with what I wanted.

Then due to life circumstances I ended up back in the home I was raised in with my elderly parent.

I have been slowly redoing the home to my likes. It feels right.

 

[Swellegant]

I can't go home again because I never left. I mean, I didn't always live full-time with my Grandmother, but this house was always my home.

But sometimes I'll come across an old picture or an old object in storage and remember what it was like living here as a child, and I sometimes miss that... but mostly I just miss being able to fit comfortably in the furniture before I got so damned tall.

 

[eddielee]

I don't think I can fit back inside the vagina. Seriously, I live near where I grew up.

 

[looneysamo]

Because my parents were in the Navy, we moved around every three or four years. This happened until I was a senior in high school. I went to 12 different schools before I graduated.

So "home" is where my family lives now, but I also claimed my houses of both sets of grandparents, too.
Since I teach, I get several small vacations a year. I usually go to where my parents live now, in New Mexico. I only lived in that house for a year, so it is always a little like staying in a hotel, to me.
However, I sleep so well when I'm home. I think it is the idea that my parents are there.

My mother always hints at me moving home, but I know that I wouldn't be happy doing that.