Seekers--Searching for Home

Joan #3

Finding a home of her own

Joan goes on with her story:

“As a young child, I had expressed my frustrations with tantrums. As a teenager, I expressed feelings of frustration with rebelliousness. To make matters worse, I had to keep moving around because I lived with my brother Paul, and he was in the army. During those years I had little opportunity to be out in nature. I felt out of place everywhere and put all my attention on trying to figure out how to make friends—without much luck. When I was young, my brother Paul was the one who put on band-aids when I fell and scrapped my knees. He was often kind to me in other ways, but as a teenager when I lived with Paul and his young family, I gave him the impression that I was wild. He tried to control me and that only made everything worse.

“One day Paul came into my room and sat me down on my bed. He told me quite harshly that he hoped I would behave myself, because I had no other place to go adding that there was no one else who loved me. It was sobering to hear him say aloud what I already knew was true. After he scolded me, I tried hard to straighten up. I believed him when he said that I had nowhere else to go. I wasn’t scared, but I was sad. I wanted to be loved. I felt terribly alone.

Joan was buffeted about during her first eighteen years. Her life was made up of disjointed events with no place for her to land. She was confused about who she was and where she belonged. It isn’t surprising that she was searching for someone to love, and she married young. Joan told me about meeting her husband Mike:

“I began to put my early experiences together when I was eighteen, and met Mike, my first husband. We fell in love, and told each other our life’s’ stories. Up until then I had no sense that I had a story. At the time, I was up in the Santa Cruz Mountains as a camp counselor at a girls’ camp. My mind cleared and I found parts of myself that I remembered from all the times when I had been up in the Sierras, hiking and horseback riding. I thought about everything that had happened to me. At this camp, I began to work with horses again. These interactions with horses, loving them, understanding them, working with children, and feeling my body, brought me up against myself trying to figure out who I was. My life story was bursting out of me when Mike showed up.

“I saw him at the barn and was enormously attracted to him. He was training the horses. He was handsome and so capable around them. I was determined to meet him, and came up with what I thought was a great plan. I took the camp car on an errand. I knew there was hardly any gas in it, and instead of going to get gas, I ran out of gas near the barn, where I knew I would find him. We met of course. He rescued me; a knight in shining armor, and our romance began. We were married a few months later when I was just eighteen, much to the horror of my brothers, who thought I was too young. At the time, I was ecstatic. Mike was my hero. I counted on him, learned from him. This caused problems for us later on, as he was enormously possessive, but in the beginning I finally felt deeply loved and cared for.

“After we married we took off, not knowing where we would end up. I wanted to be away from my family and to live in a different place. We were romantic and idealistic. Our only requirements were that we land some place beautiful where we would work with horses and finish school. We packed up all our possessions in an old station wagon and drove east. We ended up in Charlottesville, Virginia. We chose Charlottesville because it was beautiful horse country, and we found work on a horse farm in exchange for our rent.

“On the horse farm where we worked, we were housed in what used to be a slave cabin with high ceilings and no insulation. That winter was the coldest winter in eighty-eight years. A coal stove that went out in the middle of the night provided our heat. We needed it for heat and hot water, and because we were young we thought this too was romantic. On my nineteenth birthday, in February, Mike devised a plan to keep the stove going all night so we’d have both heat and hot water. He made a contraption that dripped oil into the coal box of the stove from a shelf above it. That night, we were quite pleased with ourselves. The next morning when we woke up the walls of the cabin were black. The oil drip had caught fire and smoked through the night.

We didn’t last long at the farm. “I didn’t fit in Charlottesville, but I was more confident by then about what I thought and what I had to say. I didn’t understand the rules of the South. It was the late forties, and segregation was still firmly in place. I was deeply disturbed by the treatment of African-Americans there. I often found myself commenting or protesting what others around me took for granted. I even managed to get a police record in Charlottesville. One day, I parked illegally outside the post office. When I came out, a police officer was writing me a ticket. I confronted him, saying that the city didn’t provide adequate parking spaces, and I had only been there for a minute or two. He handed me the ticket. I tore it up, and threw it at his feet. He took me to the local courthouse for an immediate trial. In spite, of the added fine, I was pleased with myself. It was probably a good thing that we stayed there for only a short while.

“We left Charlottesville with all our things and our two dogs. Back on the road, we first visited San Diego where my grandmother Banna and my aunt lived. Then we headed for Phoenix. We had a plan to develop a commercial stable with another couple that Mike knew. They turned out not to be the best business partners, so Mike pursued his engineering career and I taught riding and worked in stables as we worked our way back west. Finally, we landed back in Northern California.

“Together with a group of people, we were able to buy 120 acres in the foothills of Portola Valley. We personally bought five of those acres and built the house that I live in now. It was during those years that we had three children; Mark, Lyn, and Kim. In 1957, we all moved into our new house, this house that I still live in today. We chose the property because it is surrounded by hills and open oak-studded grasslands, good for riding and schooling horses. It was tremendously important to me to move here. We imagined that we would live here for the rest of our lives.”

Joan had finally found a home, and that provided her with the foundation on which she created a life of her own choosing. Fate wasn’t to make life easy for Joan, but as she learned to speak her mind and to make choices, her home held her in ways that her family had not. Her sense of home gave her the support that she needed to get through the hard times still ahead.