People often think of home as a place — a physical comfort zone where one eats, sleeps and feels protected from the outside world. In reality, home is a concept with so much nuance; no one can attach an exclusive definition to it.
Graziadio student and Horizon Scholar Dave Montoya grew up without a sense of home, moving around the foster-care system until he was 18 years old.
“Home to me is something that I am trying to figure out,” Montoya said. “You know, it’s almost like something I’m trying to build. I don’t think it’s a physical place. I always thought, like, ‘Oh, it could be a physical place,’ but I think it’s much, much, much more complex than that.”
For those — like Montoya — who grew up without a traditional home, or for those who moved around often, home can be difficult to define. Students and professors said that as they have grown up, their vision of what home is has evolved, and they have had to find ways to bring home with them as their lives have changed.
Defining Home
First-year Adelaide Lowry was born in Texas but grew up primarily in Greece and Macedonia, traveling with her missionary parents to Romani and Middle Eastern refugee camps. Her life lacked external stability, she said, and that uncertainty drove her to redefine what most kids think of as home.
“Truthfully, if I didn’t love Jesus, I would feel so unsettled,” Lowry said. “I think that was definitely my saving grace in a lot of areas. The thing that has remained consistent is that God has always been there for me.”
Lowry’s four years at Pepperdine will be the longest she’s ever lived in one place. Growing up, she defined home based on internal practices rather than external factors, which led her to not rely on her surroundings to make her feel safe and at peace.
Now, Lowry said she enjoys change and transitions in her life, so she doesn’t know how it is going to feel to stay at Pepperdine for four years.
“For some reason, I feel more at home when I’m not settled,” Lowry said.
Terra Hall, associate dean of Student Affairs for Diversity and Belonging, said throughout her life, she has found that her definition of home has changed based on the circumstances she is living under.
“Home could be a geographical place, or it could be the people, it could be the food, the familiarity,” Hall said.
Before moving to California to work at Pepperdine two years ago, Hall defined home as Baltimore, where she lived for over 40 years and started her family. Since the move, Hall said she is still exploring how to make Los Angeles feel more like home.
“I feel like I’m in a study abroad,” Hall said. “You know, you move somewhere completely new and completely different, and you’re still trying to figure it all out — like, how long will we be here?”
With two teenage sons, Hall said she wonders how they will answer when people ask where their home is. She said Baltimore isn’t home anymore, but California also doesn’t feel like home.
“Lots of different things come to mind when I think of home, but I would say it’s more about the people than, for me, the geographical space,” Hall said.
Psychology Professor Anna Penner also didn’t grow up in California — or the United States. Penner’s parents were American missionaries in Japan, where she was born and lived until she went to college.
“Japan doesn’t feel like — it feels like where I’m from originally — but it doesn’t feel like home,” Penner said. “So it’s a really complicated thing for me to tease out.”
For the first few years of her life, Penner lived in a rural town in Northern Japan before moving to the bustling city of Tokyo in middle school.
Penner spoke English in her house, had a family dog and practiced traditions specific to her family, so she said she detached those elements that shaped her idea of home from the location where they took place. She also attended an international school, where she noticed a pattern of students graduating and leaving the country only to come back as an adult because of its sense of familiarity.
“Enough students had trouble making the transition from Japan to their home country, which didn’t feel like home, right, because they had spent so much time in Japan, and they would end up going back to Japan to work,” Penner said.
This led Penner to notice that home has a different meaning for everyone, and she wanted to discover what it meant to her.
“I promised myself I won’t go back there to work or live until I feel like America’s home,” Penner said.
She quickly realized that the emotional definition of home was where “there’s a peacefulness, like a stillness, within yourself of, ‘OK, I can breathe. I can relax from everything that’s going on around me.’”
While Penner’s idea of home is unconventional, Montoya never knew a home in any definition of the word at all.
Montoya only lived with his mother for a short time before moving in with his grandmother, and soon after, he entered the foster-care system. That prompted a pattern of jumping from house to house with different families, few traditions, ever-changing rules and an inconsistent support group.
Montoya is now 39-years-old and a father of three, and he said it wasn’t until he had his children that he realized the word ‘home’ was something he was capable of understanding.
“When I hear the word home, I would say it’s difficult for me to really give a clear answer because I don’t know what that is,” Montoya said.
Despite all the life experience he has had as an adult, Montoya said the trauma of growing up without having a place or people to call home has followed him throughout his life in his relationships, career goals and how he raises his kids. At the same time, he said being able to define home entirely on his own has been empowering — and he has learned a lot from his kids.
“We’re building what I didn’t have, and I’m excited,” Montoya said.
Curating a Sense of Home
Lowry’s parents were preaching Christianity around Europe, but because there were only Greek Orthodox churches where they lived, they had to find their own ways to practice their nondenominational Christianity. With God playing a large role in providing stability, Lowry’s family made sure to prioritize that in their home.
“You can’t have a non-Greek Orthodox Church in Greece, so we didn’t have a church that we could go to,” Lowry said. “So we kind of just became a church ourselves, and we ended up having a house church with some Middle Eastern refugees.”
Her faith, paired with her unwavering sense of self and constant support from loved ones, has given Lowry the skills to have a home with her at all times.
“Home to me can be anywhere,” Lowry said. “I feel like I could be thrown into any country with any group of people, and feel at peace because my soul is content.”
When Hall moved her teenage sons and husband to California, she said they brought pieces of their Baltimore home life with them to make the transition more comfortable.
“My mother, who passed away, she collected Black angels. So I inherited those and they have been in every place that we’ve been,” Hall said. “I was intentional about packing them up with care, and then being able to unwrap those boxes that had the angels and artwork — that gave me a sense of comfort.”
At the same time, Hall recognizes that for many — especially college students away from home for the first time — the switch can be scary no matter what one does to avoid feeling unsettled. She said if people are unwilling to redefine their idea of home with change, they will never fully feel content.
“[People] have to become familiar with the unfamiliar and have to be in a situation where they are positioned to develop some new routines,” Hall said.
Lowry said the same. Something she is grateful to have learned while her family often uprooted their lives throughout her childhood was the ability to be friends with anyone. If Lowry wanted to have a sense of home — even if that was only for a short period of time — she had to create connections that brought her a sense of peace and reliability.
“Having to move around a lot has made me really intentional,” Lowry said. “It’s molded a lot of my friendships. I really care a lot about the people that I’m talking to, and it makes me present because I have to just go the extra level, since friendships aren’t something that was, I guess you could say, instilled into the communities that I had been joining.”
Penner, whose grandfather was Jewish, said one tradition her family took from his faith was Shabbat, a Jewish practice of gathering every Friday for a day of rest. That weekly dinner is something Penner said she has taken with her into adulthood.
“We started doing Shabbat — the Sabbath meal — Friday at night,” she said. “We started doing that before our big move to Tokyo, and that’s something we did basically every Friday, all through middle school and high school.”
That, paired with having a tight-knit and supportive community of friends and family, allowed her to have a sustainable outlet of joy and calm, which made her feel at home no matter where she was.
“I knew, if I’m having a bad day, I can have that bad day with these people, and they might not love it, but they will love me, and I don’t have to worry about their perception of me,” Penner said. “Even if it’s not in a specific space, it’s like where I know I have their back, they have my back and I can just relax and know what to expect.”
Montoya is still building traditions with his young kids, with the hope that they will feel that reliability Penner spoke about. He said once a year, he takes his children on a big, days-long Disneyland trip. More regularly, they have a sit-down dinner once a week where he grills on the barbecue and they all leave their electronics in another room.
“I’m the father of three kids, and I think I’m trying to provide that,” Montoya said. “I just try to give them opportunities that I didn’t have as a kid and just be present in their lives.”
Montoya’s primary goal is to be a reliable figure for his children. He said they could be on different sides of the world and he hopes a phone call or text would bring them right back home in their hearts.
“Time is a big thing, you know,” Montoya said. “I wish that I had parents around — a mom or a dad. I didn’t have either. And so I’ve been very intentional about making sure I spend time with them.”
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Contact Liza Esquibias by email: liza.esquibias@pepperdine.edu
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