Households

I lived in a lot of different places and with a lot of different people as a kid and teenager. My parents split up when I was very young, and I moved back and forth between their houses every two days (i.e. Monday/Tuesday at mom's, Wednesday/Thursday at dad's, Friday to Sunday at mom's, and then the next week would be the opposite). I would switch houses by going to school from one and then going home after school to the other, so I would carry everything I needed to bring back and forth in my backpack every day, although I ended up having two of most things. Apparently, when I was a baby, I lived with my half sister (we have the same dad) as well as my parents, but I don't remember that. My parents both eventually found new partners who each had kids from previous relationships. Both of these partners eventually moved in with the respective parent, and some step siblings also moved in and out at certain times. When I was 16, I went on exchange to Norway for one year, and I lived away from my parents. I moved out for university when I was 18. Explaining this whole situation is often pretty hard.

Given all of this movement between different places, and all of the times that I overlapped in household with different people, I decided to represent my experience using a metro map. Each coloured line represents someone in my family, starting from when they entered my life. When the lines group together, it means that all of those people lived together. I represented myself using a split line, since my life was split between two families and two households.