After My Separation, I Learned My Kids Could Have Multiple ‘Homes’

For years, writer Bee Quammie has been a role model for the next generation of Black women writers. But leaning into that role hasn’t always been easy. Her debut release, The Book of Possibilities, tackles that discomfort by challenging the idea of role models altogether—providing instead a roadmap of the varied possibilities ahead, based on her own experiences as a writer, mother and public figure. “Each [essay] represents something I learned at a key moment in my life,” she writes in the book’s introduction. In this essay from the collection, Quammie interrogates her idea of home—and how we view our physical spaces of safety, security and belonging.

I used to be stuck on the idea of building a home for my family in a very specific and singular way. I wanted my kids to spend their entire childhood under one roof because I wanted them to feel safe and secure knowing they always had one home—one place—that they could call their own.

It was all going well for the first few years. Both times after I gave birth, I drove a brown wriggling bundle eastbound, from a pristine hospital in downtown Toronto to a quiet townhouse in north Oshawa. Three years apart, my girls went from crawling to walking to running in the blink of an eye. Before they could speak, they would both wave out the wide living room window, looking toward our backyard, cheerfully babbling to a kind spirit I couldn’t see. They built their confidence waddling up and down the stairs, smiling wide, gummy smiles while I cheered. Whenever we’d return to the house after time away—whether we had gone to the grocery store or taken a trip across the border—the girls would celebrate coming “home.”

Fast-forward a couple of years, and that house was no longer our home. When their father and I decided to go our separate ways and we each rented our own apartments, I had to accept that their childhood memories would no longer live in one place either.

It took a long time to dull the pointed pain that came from distinguishing “Mommy’s house” from “Daddy’s house.” Layla once asked me, in the innocent but cutting way that children often do, if it was my fault that we moved away from our old house. Zuri once asked me, in that innocent but persistent way that children do, if we would move back into the same house when the COVID-19 pandemic was over. I felt like I had failed everyone and the vision I’d had of “home” was gone for good.

But what I learned over time, as it became second nature for them to say they were “home” with me and then “home” again with their father, is that the fantasy of a singular home was mine and mine alone. It played into my desire for security and stability, for a story that could be tied up neatly with a bow. My daughters’ young brains quickly adapted to changes and new ways of thinking, inspiring me to release some of the rigidity in mine.

I started to wonder: what is home? What transforms a structure of wood, brick, glass, and vinyl into a place of refuge, comfort, and love? And could it be somewhere I wasn’t expecting it?

Home, I realized, is a place of belonging—whether you stay there or return to it. It’s a door that opens saying, “We’ve been waiting for you,” a kitchen cupboard with your favourite mug inside, a bedroom that smells like memories. In not much time at all, the walls will carry the scent of the bergamot candle you burn religiously; the bedsheets will still smell like laundry day and you can still bury your nose in your favourite book while you wait for the blankets to dry. Home is a place of comfort, where you can sink into the plush softness of the couch and take refuge from the harshness of a bad day. Home is a place where you know you can always be—be still, be loud, be you. Home is where you don’t have to apologize for being any of those things, because that’s where you belong.

I wanted “home” for my daughters to be one place that could hold all of these things. The truth is, it can be all of those things, in different ways, in different places. The important constants of home are the people who make you feel safe and loved and the knowledge that wherever we are, we can make it our own.

Just as much as home can be a place, it can be a feeling as well. Love, acceptance, happiness, rest, relief—all of these make up the intangibles of what “home” truly is. Before we brought two babies to our Oshawa townhouse from that hospital in downtown Toronto, I was their first home. That was as much a place as it was a feeling, and they show me now that whether they’re home with me or home with their dad, it’s the feeling that makes it special. No matter where they go in this world, I hope that they remember that my home—whether it’s the place I lay my head or just the warmth of my waiting arms—will always be theirs, too.

Excerpted from The Book of Possibilities: Words of Wisdom on the Road to Becoming. Published by an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Copyright © 2025 by Bee Quammie.