There is a dollhouse upstairs in Crieff. Painted blue on the outside with an unfinished shingle roof, it waits. It has four rooms, all with patterned, carefully placed wallpaper. Bed and sofa cushions were sewn, furniture assembled and painted, it held its breath while under construction, until one Christmas many years ago – it was given to me.
My parents and sisters had spent several weeks preparing this beautiful gift and I adored it. While I don’t remember all the specifics of that one Christmas morning, I do remember hours spent staring into these little rooms, inviting my imagination inside the wooden walls.
I played with it nearly every day. It became a part of the natural landscape for my toys – off the weary ground, through the general store of bed quilts, home safe to a doll house perched on a footlocker. It had no stairs, so I spent my childhood playing with the most accomplished vaulting Legos and Playmobil. It was a treasure for me while in Angola.
After I went to boarding school, I played with it less and less. It’s difficult to be a child and to grow up at the same time. When my parents moved from Angola to the Middle East, the dollhouse was shipped to Scotland. By some miraculous will that comes only from mothers who are protecting their children’s memories, it arrived safely.
Now it sits silently on a trunk in the attic room, breathing in only dust, housing prosperous spiders, and waiting for new life.
As Jeremiah and I waited out the 2020 lockdown in Scotland I saw the dollhouse all the time. Some days I barely noticed it, others I was caught off guard by how sharply out of place it is there - where it never belonged. I have no memory of playing with this dollhouse in Scotland - cue a LOTR reference, fellow wanderers.
I only remember it in Angola, in my room, under the screened window that was almost always open. It carries the dirt of some by-gone day when I was a child and life made a little more sense in a much less safe place. It holds the weight of everything I saw and felt in that little cinder block house. It’s odd to me, that something I once cherished deeply can be so disorienting now. It doesn’t belong. It’s out of place.
And in a season where most things are out of place – school, work, families – maybe I should draw comfort from this? But I don’t.
Watching the dollhouse sag, lilting itself into the shadows, knowing it’s been dislodged from its first home, only overwhelmed me. It reminded me of all the out of place moments I feel.
I find myself relating more and more to this small, tacked together piece of doll furniture than I ever thought I could. I too, as does every TCK, feel dislodged, uprooted, repotted, repurposed. I remember vividly all the moments I have had to reinvent myself in order to fit the surroundings, whether it was during AP classes at boarding school, new airports, holiday villas, mission meetings, a university in West Tennessee, a small Mississippi town, English pubs, or first introductions.
There is that inevitable moment where I remember ‘I don’t think I belong here.’ But unlike the dollhouse that can remain safely stored between an old dresser and an ancient trunk, I have to push forward with the days. I have to wake up, meet people, make friends, build a community in order to survive the moments when I’m falling into some vast space of unknowingness and non-belonging.
Similar to the dollhouse, I carry the remnants of years past inside. Those caverns of memories are buried deep inside, some so hidden in the shadows I have to crouch down on the floor, squint and stare, trying to recognize myself in some past moment. The empty rooms in the dollhouse, ghosts of a childhood so far removed from my present, were daunting. I have to touch those painted walls to believe it was real. I have to see those Kool-aid stains on the furniture, made because I decided that if I was sweating in 40 Celsius weather my Legos probably were too. I have to ground myself and say my story is true, I belonged with my dollhouse in Angola and now it belongs to Crieff and I to Cambridge.
This doesn’t help me to feel any less uprooted. And it doesn’t help my home to feel any less out of place. I’m reminded how disjointed my life has been with each transition or any time I have to pack a bag.
Each time I move, or clean out my drawers, there’s a moment of panic as I look for familiar items – old teddy bears from high school boyfriends, t-shirts from weeklong camps, books with tattered, inked pages, journals overflowing with sentimentality, cheap keychain mementos from all the airports – often I search in vain. These belongings are mostly stored in different countries, either in my parents’ Scottish flat or my in-law’s Mississippi basement. Some of them have been lost for years and I don’t think I’ll ever know the real count until I have a home of my own.
None of these items are worth very much. They could all be duplicated in some way or another. But they are evidence of my existence and that makes them invaluable to me. When I’m searching through footlockers and boxes, I’m looking for validity – something that screams ‘It was all real, you lived it, you’re not just some shadow of a person spouting off a story line with every introduction.’
That is a difficult place to be – some quarry of unknowing and un-remembering.
Still, it can be quite liberating. When I crawl out of that attic space and stand up again, I can see that my life is a very rich collection of experiences, friends, countries, and selves. I am able to revisit the darkest of days in order to have gratitude for the bright ones. I carry the sentiment of homesickness and loss with me, so I can be compassionate and kind to others who experience it as well. I can remember that horrible feeling of displacement and have relief at being marginally settled, for now.
There is something very powerful about knowing a memory to be real, to be you, and then being able to lay it down and move forward with the present.
This is what I'm trying to learn. I am trying to be present. I am trying to be settled. I am trying to remind myself this world is such an impermanent existence. What is waiting is so much better. Each time I think of all the bits of myself and my homes scattered across the world – wedding dress in my brother-in-law’s closet, Harry Potter books in the basement, first tea set in Scotland, high school photos in the Middle East, scuffed ballet shoes stuck in an American box, a hand-made hockey stick stored in a trunk, my most valued collections and my fingerprinted trinkets long forgotten - there is an urge to panic. There’s an overwhelming feeling, as I remember silly items that are the holding places in my mind for all the people and friends and family I have, spread across too big a planet and too small a mind. It's a dangerously quick fall from that panic to hopelessness.
So I am trying to remind myself of the Truth
I’m trying to remember that this world will turn to dust. That even as I desperately try to remember all my homes, as I manically grasp at fraying thoughts and try to pack them safely away, our Creator in Heaven prepared a perfect home before my thoughts ever began. No lost luggage, no scattered memories, no stretched out families or terminal homesickness - a perfect, predetermined and expectant Home.
That is a beautiful, comforting, delightful, unquestionable Truth in this out of place world.