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It’s a standoff.

In a cottage nestled in the verdant hills of Ireland, the fiery redheaded Maureen O’Hara glares at John Wayne. She won’t sleep in their marriage bed until she has her dowry, the money and possessions she is owed from her brother.

“Until I have my things about me,” she says.

Logic tells us that it isn’t the things that make a home. Or the money that buys those things. But it’s never about the things or the money. It’s about having something of your own that you bring to your partnership. And it’s about the dream you’ve held of what your life would be.

“There’s three hundred years of dreaming in those things, and I want my dream,” she says.

When I was four, my parents moved into my father’s family home, a former farm in a suburb of Akron. We moved into the “big house,” the nineteenth century grand dame that my father’s grandfather had lived in when he lived. The small milk house where my father grew up was now occupied by my widowed grandmother. And though we were residents, the house was not really ours. My grandmother’s flowers and vegetables grew in the gardens. The bedroom that my sister and I occupied was still referred to as my grandmother’s bedroom.

When we moved north when I was in kindergarten, the roles reversed and my grandmother was a tenant in our house. It didn’t suit any of us, and she left soon after for her own apartment. This house will always be the place I consider my real home, though we were only there six years. I had my own room, a neighborhood full of kids to play with, and enough room to breathe and find places where my introvert batteries could be recharged.

I came home from school one afternoon to find my father sitting in the kitchen. He had become a victim of the latest recession, and I have forever since had panic attacks when a family member is suddenly home on a work day when they should be at the office.

Tax law is annoyingly punitive. You are allowed to pull money from certain retirement and other savings accounts without penalty if you have an emergency, but only certain emergencies count, and the consequences of those emergencies don’t count as emergencies. Thus, you can pay for medical bills with these withdrawals, but if the medical situation causes you to lose your job, like my current situation, you can’t use the money to save your house. Homelessness is apparently not an emergency.

My parents were given some erroneous information on this point. They took money out to try to save the house, then had to pay the back taxes. We had to sell the house anyway.

My seventh grade year was spent crammed into a room shared with my sister at my maternal grandmother’s small ranch. It was too small for my family of four, my grandmother, and my uncle. My grandfather had died just a few months before, and we were all still grieving. It was a tough year for all of us, and by the start of 8th grade, we had moved again.

The two bedroom apartment we moved to was furnished with the few things we had left from our family home. A kitchen dinette set. My dad’s desk. My mother’s hope chest. The bookcase. The former canopy bed from my bedroom (shared by my sister and I — at night I slept on the mattress on the floor and she slept on the box spring and frame). The toys of my childhood were stored in my grandmother’s attic. Favorite books were lost in the moves, never to be seen again. Still, the apartment was ours alone, if just rented.

My mother’s family had always gathered at our house for Christmas. I have so many great memories of playing with my cousins at those events, dressing up in old costumes and singing Happy Birthday to Jesus over a punch bowl cake. We hid in closets telling ghost stories, and ran circles around the first floor. As an adult, one of my fondest wishes was to host this annual party in my own house, with the family around me, taking pictures on the stairs.

It was never about the things. It has always been about having my dreams around me.

When my first son was born, I stopped working. At the time, it was a financial decision. I had only been working part time, and daycare cost more than my take home salary. Two years later, when I wanted a divorce, I realized how precarious a situation it is to rely on someone else to provide the financial stability for a family. I had to hide cash in the house in small amounts to save up for a lawyer. I realized I would never get a job in time to get my own apartment. I had nothing in my own name except for the car I had purchased before my marriage and paid off before my son was born. Now I needed to get out of this marriage, but I had no way of supporting myself. I had four hours to get everything out of the house. I took the furniture that had come so long ago from my family home — the bookcase, my mother’s hope chest, and the dinette set.

It was never about the things, it was about the dreams.

Sometime last September, as I was laying on the couch and sleeping off yet another two days of the work week and using up the last of my sick time, it occurred to me that I needed to stop working. Without my income, we couldn’t afford our house. The house that was currently hosting Christmas parties and pictures on the staircase. The only family home the twins had known, and the home where my oldest son grew into a young man.

We will be moving into a house that isn’t our own — living on the good will of my in laws until we can live on one income. Since my divorce, I have kept my own accounts. My husband and I have split the household expenses and managed our own accounts. If I ever needed to save for something I wanted, I could do it without asking permission. If I wanted to buy something frivolous, I didn’t have to tell anyone I was splurging. If I needed to escape… My security blankets are all gone and I’m feeling very anxious.

It’s not about the things. It’s not about the money. It’s about independence. It’s about the life I want to create for my family. It’s about dreams.

So, time to find a new dream. Or a new way to make the old dreams happen again. I need to get my things about me.