Growing up in a small Midwest town, I was standing in my kitchen, watching steam rise from the slow cooker where this week’s bone broth was bubbling away. The counters were cluttered with art supplies from yesterday’s project, and there were fingerprints on every surface. Ellie had drawn a wobbly heart on the steamy window, and for a moment, I was transported back to my childhood—another kitchen with mismatched dishes, a temperamental oven, and windows that fogged up the same way when my mother made soup from whatever vegetables were on sale that week.
That kitchen of my childhood was smaller. The appliances were older. But somehow, it held more. Or maybe it held something different—something I’ve been trying to recreate in my own home ever since Ellie was born five years ago.
The richness that has nothing to do with bank accounts
Growing up, we didn’t have much money. What we did have was a garden that my mother tended with the kind of devotion usually reserved for precious things. Every meal was homemade because it had to be—restaurants were for other families, not ours. But here’s what I remember most: the fullness of it all. The way our small house seemed to expand to hold whatever joy we brought into it.
Now I live in an older two-story house with appliances that actually work on the first try. My kids have their own rooms. We can afford organic groceries without checking the bank balance first. And yet, some evenings, after the kids are asleep and Matt and I are doing our usual check-in (“How was your day really?” he’ll ask, and I’ll actually tell him), I feel this pull toward something I can’t quite name.
Have you ever felt homesick for a feeling rather than a place? That’s what this is. A longing for the particular quality of togetherness that bloomed in the gaps where money might have been.
When less created more
Last week, Ellie asked why we don’t eat out more often like her friends’ families do. I found myself struggling to explain that it’s not about the money anymore. We could eat out more often if we wanted to. But those homemade meals, the ritual of cooking together, the messy counters and the steamy windows—they’re holding something in place. Something fragile and essential.
My parents built our sense of security not from financial stability but from predictable rhythms and reliable presence. Saturday mornings were for fixing whatever was broken. Sunday afternoons meant everyone in the garden, pulling weeds or planting seeds. Evenings found us all in that small kitchen, talking over each other while dinner came together from whatever we’d grown or found on sale.
These weren’t Instagram-worthy moments. Nobody was documenting our simple life for social media. But those unremarkable days stacked up into something solid, something that held us even when the electricity got shut off for a day or when new shoes had to wait another month.
The paradox of having enough
The irony isn’t lost on me that now, when I can buy my kids pretty much anything they need, I’m desperately trying to give them the experience of not having everything. Not out of some misguided nostalgia, but because I’ve learned that fullness and abundance are different things.
Abundance is what fills my pantry now. Fullness is what filled our house then.
When you can’t buy entertainment, you create it. When you can’t purchase solutions, you make them together. When resources are limited, resourcefulness becomes unlimited. My childhood home was a masterclass in this kind of alchemy—turning limitation into connection, scarcity into creativity.
Do you remember the last time you had to really figure something out with your family? Not Google the answer or buy the solution, but actually sit together and problem-solve? That’s what every day was like for us, and it knitted us together in ways I’m only now beginning to understand.
Recreating fullness in the age of plenty
So here I am, financially comfortable and spiritually seeking, trying to engineer the kind of natural togetherness that arose organically from our circumstances back then. It feels a bit like trying to recreate a campfire in a house with central heating—possible, but requiring intention where none was needed before.
Saturday mornings, Matt makes pancakes with the kids. It’s his tradition, one we protect fiercely against soccer practice and playdates. I make bone broth every week, filling the house with that same savory steam I remember from childhood. We keep a garden, though we don’t need it for survival. The kids help tend it, complaining about the dirt under their nails just like I used to.
But sometimes I wonder if they can feel the difference. The chosen simplicity versus the required simplicity. The scheduled togetherness versus the inevitable closeness of a small space and shared resources.
What money can’t buy back
Perhaps what I’m homesick for is the absence of choice itself. When you have one family room, everyone gathers there. When you have one car, you figure out how to share it. When eating out isn’t an option, the kitchen becomes the heart of the home by default, not by design.
Now, with multiple rooms and screens and endless options for entertainment and escape, togetherness requires conscious choice. We have to decide to gather, decide to cook together, decide to stay in the same room even when we could each retreat to our own spaces.
The abundance I wanted to provide for my children sometimes feels like it’s pulling us apart even as I work to hold us together. The very comfort I’ve worked to achieve has become something to overcome.
Finding our way home
Maybe the unnamed thing I’m homesick for is the clarity that comes with constraint. The way a river needs banks to flow strong. Without those natural boundaries, we have to create our own—and that’s the work I’m doing now, imperfectly but persistently.
The fullness I remember from childhood wasn’t despite the lack of money. It was because in the absence of purchased pleasures, we had to make our own joy. In the absence of individual space, we had to learn to live with each other’s moods and rhythms. In the absence of endless options, we had to make the most of what we had.
I can’t give my kids the same childhood I had—the world has changed too much, and our circumstances are too different. But I can protect spaces for that same fullness to grow. In the kitchen with its cluttered counters. In the garden with its dirty knees and sun-warm tomatoes. In the thousand small moments when we choose togetherness even though we don’t have to.
The house I grew up in was full because it had to be. The house I’m raising my kids in is full because we choose to fill it. Different paths to the same destination—a home where love takes up more space than anything money could buy.
