For most of my life, home was my mom’s house in my hometown. We moved there right after I turned four. My sister and I spent the next several years building elaborate My Little Pony villages in the basement playroom. I spent hours on my pogo stick in the driveway where my dad parked until my parents divorced and he moved out and nobody parked there. Eight years later I parked my own car in that driveway and would wake up extra early on winter mornings to shovel myself out. First the television was upstairs, then it was downstairs. First my mom’s bedroom was downstairs, then it was upstairs. I lived through the before and after of both badly-needed bathroom renovations.

After I moved away to college, home was still home. It’s not like my cinder block dorm room was every really going to be home. I remember flying back for Christmas getting excited as we would drive over the last hill and down into the valley and I would see the lake again for the first time in months. I would walk through the front door into the kitchen and release a psychic sigh.

I am home.

You know where this is going. That feeling of home started gradually shifting, I think sometime during the second half of our time in New York City. Not that New York City was home either–I never quite settled in there. But our little apartment felt like home in some ways that my family home no longer did. A weird liminal time. And at some point after that my mom’s house became not home, just a place I visited.

We have not yet been in this new house two months and already it is feeling like home. Not completely. We’re still missing a LOT of furniture and desperately need to hang some things on the walls and I still have three boxes of books sitting in the living room waiting for a bookshelf to magically appear. But it feels like home.

I am even starting to love the exterior of this house. I’ll be honest: I fell in love with the interior and was willing to accept the exterior. But now I walk up the steps to the front door and feel a great fondness for the weird look and the less-than-functional mailbox and the overgrown bushes.

I don’t wake up confused about which house I’m in anymore. I drive by my old house on my way to work and feel a twinge of sentimental curiosity, but not the ravaging grief that I had expected.

I’m disturbed by how quickly I’ve switched allegiances this time. It took years of unraveling for my mom’s house to no longer feel like home. This took less than two months. And I was OBSESSED with my old house. I mean come on, I met all the previous owners and wrote a freaking history book about it. I loved every corner of that house. I have given a great deal of thought to exactly which part of that house I’m going to haunt when I die.*

And yet, here I am lovingly running my fingers across the brick on this new house. Getting excited every time I go up the narrow attic stairs. Drinking my coffee and admiring the way the old glass in the French windows changes the shape of the world outside.

I remember about a year ago when we were just starting to take the house hunt seriously and I told a friend of mine how distraught I was at the thought of leaving our old house which we loved. They had done the same thing, selling a too-small home and buying a new just-right home years before us. She too had loved her too-small home. How did she manage to make the leap?

“I did love that house,” she told me. “And now I love this house.”

And that’s it, a disturbing reality. You can love one thing and then your love comes to a natural conclusion, and you start loving another thing. As someone who is happily married and in it for the long haul, I find this entire concept disturbing. If I can stop loving my old house, can I stop loving my husband too? My kids? My stupid-ass cats?

But the story underneath the reality is different. I spent probably a full year gently, intentionally untangling myself emotionally from our old house. Moving on from my mom’s house took at least seven years, and was a very natural milestone on the way to adulthood. I would have to try very hard and tell myself lots of fake stories about how terrible they all are in order to fall out of love with my husband or my kids or my stupid-ass cats (although the cats are admittedly quite terrible).

This reminds me of another quote from another friend that I think about a lot. She works with elderly people in the hospital.

“The biggest mistake that people make as they age is being too attached to their living situation,” she told me. And that has stuck with me. So in twenty or thirty years when it’s time to make a change and move on from this house I hope I can remember that my heart’s home has changed before, several times, and I can change it again. But only if I want to.

*Probably the kitchen, but it would also be awesome to be a ghost woman playing a ghost piano in the living room so I’m considering that as well.