special guest post by martha jane! on actually moving home.

This piece was inspired by Jessie’s post about moving home after attending the POOR conference. I read it and, since I had recently moved home, felt a lot that resonated. Here are some of my thoughts on the experience.

Since I graduated from college I’ve lived in several different gentrifying neighborhoods. Most of the time living in these neighborhoods left me feeling some combination of guilty and out of place. As much as I saw myself as a gentrifier and therefore a person with systemic power I continued to feel powerless in terms of making decisions about where I lived. I repeatedly felt that I had no affordable options that would allow me to avoid contributing to the process of gentrification. I was deeply troubled by my complicity in this violent process. I spent a lot of time talking with friends in the same situation about what our best choices and options were, and how much power we really had when it seemed like so much was decided for us by banks, city planners, realtors, etc. While I resisted gentrification by engaging in economic justice and housing rights organizing, getting to know my neighbors and supporting local organizing, I was constantly bothered by the fact that the physical presence of my body in the neighborhood where I lived was contributing to a cycle of displacement. One year later I still have no good answers for this conundrum but I have found a solution that works for me: one that I am finding to be surprisingly fulfilling, radical and transformative.

I recently suffered a bike accident and had to go home to my parents’ house for surgery and recovery. The moment I got here something clicked. Living at home feels like the most right thing I've done since college. Let me back up for a minute before I lay out all the reasons why living at home is beautiful and radical and fulfilling for me and let you know some things about what home is for me. My background is upper middle class and white. My family is queer and Jewish, academic, liberal, socially engaged and connected. For me home has never been a place of violence or insecurity. Unlike many people close to me, I feel more safe and loved and in the home of my family of origin than anywhere else. I think that my ability to do the things I most believe in and am most committed to- writing, organizing, art- is owed in large part to the longstanding support of my family of origin.

I know that part of the reason this change feels so right to me is that I have always felt better at intergenerational relationships than anything else. In the past I’ve felt ashamed of this but right now I’m finding it allows me to do the really important work of building relationships of trust with those who have different views from me. In the past I have mostly lived and spent time with communities of young white activist queers. I have felt pretty alone in these communities and I’ve come to think this is because a lot of my peers have had a real need to distance themselves from their family and family's lifestyles, and this has translated into a sort of urgency around building community. I’ve a hard time plugging into this way of building community because of my strong relationship with my family of origin. At this moment in time, I’m coming to see this as a gift that helps me contribute to change and growth of all the communities I’m part of.

So. Living at home feels like the most right thing for me emotionally and politically, and right now, like the place where I can do the most important work. There are a number of reasons why: first, there is a room for me here in the house my parents own. Sharing space with my family, for me, means I am not paying rent to a landlord somewhere else. This means that the money that would go to rent can go to other things such as organizations whose work I believe in and individuals in need. It also means that the hours I would have to work for pay in order to pay the rent are lessened and I can spend more hours volunteering, organizing, writing, doing childcare and contributing to my family and community in important ways.

Being able to contribute to and build with my family and community of origin had proved to be invaluable for me. Because I have grown up in this family/community there are concrete ways that I know how to contribute. For instance, taking care of my baby sister and other young people and dogs in the neighborhood as well as cooking, cleaning and shopping. Contributing this way to my family and community very solidly feels like work I should be doing. It makes a lot more sense to me than many things I have been paid to do as work in the past; for instance, being a youth-worker in communities where I have no experiential context or connection to the youth I am working with and so can’t really provide good mentorship. While I am living at home I can support (financially and otherwise) radical youth work that goes on in communities that I am not part of (but care about) and provide it for the communities that I am actually part of.

Contributing this way to my family and community means getting up close and personal with the class my parents and their friends are in and how it functions and sustains itself. This is incredibly important work for me, because I want to make sure I don’t become them. That is to say, I want to develop strategies to avoid hoarding the wealth my family has and break the cycle of the bourgeoisie reinventing itself generation after generation. In the past, I have feared that, after growing up in a home of extreme comfort, I would gradually retreat to a similar lifestyle as I got older without being conscious of it. Now I am realizing all the complex ways that class sustains itself that I was not able to really notice as a child, and understanding concrete ways that I can make different choices from my parents.

Because I am doing the work of spending time and contributing to my family and community of origin I am sustaining and building relationships of trust with many individuals whom I wouldn’t otherwise. This means I am seeing people in this class and culture more and more as allies. I am listening to them more deeply, with greater compassion, and understanding and valuing the ways they contribute to the world. Because we are building trust I am able to challenge them to question things both easy and hard, like their reliance on liberal media, or their spending habits and choices about how to give and invest money. Conversations like these require a lot of trust built. I am realizing that dialogue between radical and liberal politics has huge potential for making both sides grow. I also see value in things I didn't before, such as the work my mom and her colleagues do as scientists. There is the reality that my parents and people they are connected to in the world of wealthy liberal professionals, have a lot of power. The more time I spend with them, the more they grow to care about things I care about. For instance, after years of conversations about prison abolition, my mom, of her own initiative, wrote and read something about the prison industrial complex and abolition at a Passover Seder last spring.

Last year when I graduated from college, I and many people I knew moved across the country to be engaged in a large community of social justice activists involved in a number of liberation struggles including anti-racism work, anti PIC activism and economic justice. While I learned a lot from spending time in that world, from this vantage point I am seeing the way that staying at home can be more effective than following a larger activist community. That kind of activism needs to happen everywhere and especially in places where there are much fewer people already doing the work. Also, when my family and community learn about the local social justice struggles I am involved with, they want to learn more and contribute to these struggles.

Here at home I am constantly entering new spaces of young people and being asked where I live. When I say I live at my parents house they have to get over the idea that that means failure in order to connect with me. And they always do. I think presenting this model of returning to your family/community as opposed to growing up and moving on and being independent starts to dissolve some of the allure that capitalist independence has. While I understand that for many this is not an option, in the class I come from moving away after college (often to another city), is so deeply the norm that young people from my background are often very surprised to see me challenge it (is the rupturing of continuity in family and community part of what allows this privileged class to keep reinventing itself? How?)

As a writer, artist and organizer the business of owning where I come from has always been very important to me. Returning to the place I come from and doing work in my family and community of origin feels to me like a very empowering and meaningful way to do this. It is, after all, work that I am in a unique position to do.