Photos by Melissa Houston
As she saw her favorite part of the house for the last time, tears blurred her vision. She walked down the spiral staircase, into her father’s home office, past the fish tank that held 200 small fish and to the wall that defined her family — her home.
Sophomore Romane Bonnet would go on to live in six homes in Los Angeles, but only one place would ever truly feel like home — the beautiful white house in the 12th arrondissement in Paris, with white moulure trim connecting the walls and the ceilings and a garden of bamboo in the backyard.
“When we had to move, I helped my mom take every picture down, and I was crying because it was just so beautiful,” Bonnet said. “The people around us, our family and friends, knew that this was the wall of our family.”
Leaving Paris when she was 12 — after Bonnet’s immediate family relocated to LA for her dad’s work — she never truly felt settled again.
“I’ve never lived more than like a year and a half in a house [in LA], and I don’t consider that enough time to feel like home,” Bonnet said.
A childhood home holds memories and acts as a safety blanket — a place where nostalgia unfolds and anxiety washes away. For Pepperdine community members who have had to say goodbye to their childhood home, leaving means changing one’s physical address, but also reconstructing what home means to them.
Romane Bonnet grew up in Paris, France, and is now a student at Pepperdine.
Mourning the Loss of a Childhood Home
She always wanted to feel at home in LA, but Bonnet’s family — who have French citizenship — could never guarantee that they would not have to return to Paris. She herself just got her U.S. Green Card. As a result, they found themselves moving from house to house as renters, often being kicked out by homeowners who wanted to sell their homes.
Because of this feeling of instability, Bonnet has never felt inclined to make her room feel like home. She described her room at her current family home as “completely just white with a bed and a desk.”
“I might move in six months, so what’s the point of decorating this room?” Bonnet said.
Kelly Haer, executive director of the Boone Center for the Family, said this is common for people who are familiar with loss.
“It’s a sense of protection,” Haer said. “I don’t want to get too attached, I don’t want to feel too attached, I don’t want to feel too comfortable here because I’m about to lose it again.”
While leaving a home is challenging, it also opens up the opportunity for individual growth and reflection, Haer said.
“It really begs the question and the opportunity for people to define, like, what is home?” Haer said. “A physical place is home. People is home. A house is home, a city or neighborhood.”
First-year Grace DeAmicis has considered Atlanta, Charlotte, New York and now Malibu home. Just a few months ago, she added a new location to the list: Las Vegas. With her dad’s job forcing her family to relocate, DeAmicis became accustomed to moving homes often.
Spending her formative childhood years in Atlanta, DeAmicis considers that her childhood home. When the temperatures warm up, she relives the big wooden fence around the yard that enclosed her and her friends running through the sprinklers in the summer heat.
Since starting her first year at Pepperdine this past fall, DeAmicis has learned the difficulty that comes with answering “Where are you from?” She usually responds with Charlotte, having lived there since she was 13.
While she will always hold on to climbing on her playground in Georgia and drinking Cheerwine soda in Charlotte, DeAmicis found there is something special about being able to find home in a new place.
“I mean, I would love to have the same home that I did have — I think that would definitely be super awesome if I could go back to the home that I grew up in,” DeAmicis said. “But I also think it helped me grow more and not get too attached to a place and realize that home isn’t a house, and it’s more of the people and growing.”
Connie Horton, vice chancellor of the RISE Institute, compared leaving home for college to psychologist Mary Ainsworth’s “The Strange Situation” experiment. In the famous 1970s study, Ainsworth showed the connection between a child’s inclination to explore and their mother being nearby, according to Simply Psychology.
“If you have a secure base and you have a secure attachment to those parents, then you explore the playroom, right?” Horton said. “And so I always tell parents when I’m talking about this, ‘When in college, the playroom just got a little bigger — they’re going to look back at you, but let them explore.’”
One of the most dreadful questions for Bonnet comes every October, November, December and February — “Are you going home for break?”
“If [students] are asked that question and they don’t know how to answer it, that can be, you know, a difficult moment to just have to figure out, ‘What is a fair way to answer this question?’” Haer said. “That can just kind of create a difficult moment to navigate, to know what to say.”
Despite not living in Paris for over eight years now, when people ask her where she is from, Bonnet still answers with the only place that has ever felt like home.
“I always say I’m from Paris,” Bonnet said. “That’s just fully who I am, and that’s what feels like home the most.”
Grace DeAmicis now has a cherry blossom tattoo, reminding her of her backyard in Georgia.
Carrying on Icons of Home
Bonnet’s Christmases have never felt the same since she left Paris eight years ago. Every year, she would walk into her living room to see all her family members sitting on the large sofa next to the fireplace, which had a doorway connecting it to the dining room, where they would then have what she described as “a cliche French meal” — a meal that took five hours.
At these meals, Bonnet was never allowed to drink sodas. Yet every day after school, she would sit and admire the two limited edition Marc Jacobs Coca-Cola bottles her parents had collected years earlier. As she swooned over the vintage collectibles, her parents promised her that if she had good enough grades, the bottles would be hers.
“Do you want them?” her parents asked her when the school year came to a close. As she reflected on the bottles that she had such strong adoration for all those years, she suddenly realized how their meaning would change if they just belonged to her.
“I was like, ‘No, really I just want them as the mascot of our house, of our family,’” Bonnet said.
While on the playground in her Georgia backyard, DeAmicis would always take moments to marvel at the big cherry blossom tree in the corner. Across the large field of grass, her childhood dogs would race across the yard, sometimes shaking the tree, forcing the flowers to fall.
For spring break, DeAmicis traveled to Japan and was pleasantly surprised to experience cherry blossom season there. Seeing the trees again inspired her to carry a piece of home with her everywhere in the form of a tattoo.
“I was like, ‘Oh, well I definitely want something to represent that because it was a very big part of my childhood,’” DeAmicis said. “It reminds me a lot of growing up in Georgia and all of my friends from that time.”
For students struggling with homesickness, Horton suggests drawing inspiration from DeAmicis, finding comfort in having home close by all the time.
“Find something from home, sometimes literally, to bring with you,” Horton said. “You know that no, you will never have that house again, but you can bring those throw pillows that were on that old couch that’s getting thrown out in the move.”
Moving Onward
When Horton was a sophomore at Pepperdine and studying abroad in Heidelberg, Germany, she found out her parents were moving and that she would never truly come back home. While this was not an ideal time to deal with the situation, Horton believes that living in another country taught her she would ultimately be OK.
“You do learn things about yourself during that that serve you in other stages, even though you wouldn’t have signed up for it,” Horton said.
Though DeAmicis has lived in several places, moving to Pepperdine meant it would be the first place she called home on the West Coast.
“I think I wanted something different, something new,” DeAmicis said. “Even though I’ve had a bunch of new things, I still really wanted a fresh start.”
DeAmicis firmly believes that her acclimation to change throughout her childhood made her transition into college smoother. Though loss is inherent to change, the lessons learned and carried forward are valuable.
“I mean [with] home, I think that loss thing is partly ‘Am I OK?’” Horton said. “You can be OK, you can create a sense of home anywhere, and you can get that sense of home anywhere, and you can get that sense that you are the same person.”
Bonnet’s collection of homes growing up made her realize just how special it is to have a place to feel like, call and consider home. While she has become accustomed to saying goodbye, the biggest lesson she has learned is that home can be created again.
“In a way, of course it sucks — I would rather be living still in my childhood home,” Bonnet said. “But I also know that I will one day have that again.”
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Contact Amanda Monahan via email: amanda.monahan@pepperdine.edu or via Instagram: @amandamonahanjournalism