Porous Walls and Identity Management: A Case Study of a Role and an Identity Attached to Former School Experiences,Temporary Present in the Home

Abstract

Can a home have porous boundaries and be a place in which the individual experiences to be in control? And how do these qualities play out in the understanding of home as the indirect center of everyday life, where the individual makes coherent meaning of the multitude of roles and arenas they partake in as members of fragmented societies? This study shows that the boundaries’ porous quality not only allows for spatial but also temporal permeation, challenging the storyteller’s sense of control and impacting meaning-making and identity management. In the narrative case study, temporarily, the role and identity attached to the storyteller’s former role as a student enter her home as an unintended consequence of digital paperwork performed at home. This role and identity from another time and place do not match the relationships, roles, and identities attached to her home today. The narrative analysis exemplifies how the storyteller creates meaning when narrating her story, reclaiming control and managing her identity.

A Story About Digital Paperwork

This article explores a story told by a young mother that I have named Charlotte. She is in her late twenties, recalling a recent situation where she is at home and is about to complete a digital form issued by the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV). It is a standardized form that she needs to fill in to start a process whereby she will receive financial support from her former partner and the father of her oldest son. Their son is now living with her majority of the time, and she therefore has the right to receive financial support from the son’s father to cover his share of everyday life expenses for their shared child. It is this form that is at the heart of the story.

In her story, Charlotte emphasizes that this is not a task she finds easy. Embarking on managing the task takes planning, as she does not want her frustration to “spill” onto her two children. She therefore makes sure to do the paperwork while the children are not at home. When she is finally working on the form on her computer, her husband enters the room she is in to ask if she needs help. As a result, he gets “thrown out of the house” by Charlotte. The full interview segment in which the story unfolds in a dialogue between Charlotte and me is found under the heading “Digital Paperwork.”

This case study is set within the frame of everyday life with home at its indirect center (Gullestad, 1989). Gullestad (1989) understood the home to be the hub of everyday life, where people make coherent meaning of the multitude of roles and arenas they partake in as members of fragmented societies. She considered roles, in addition to status and positions, to be components in the individual’s identity management, and that identities are performed and negotiated in interactions and influenced by context (Burke, 1945, 1969; Goffman, 1959; Gullestad, 1984; Jenkins, 2014). Partaking in what can be referred to as identity management, the individual seeks to answer the “question about what kind of person one is or wants to be” (Gullestad, 1984, p. 21) and who am I? (Bamberg, 2011, 2012, p. 102).

Identities do not only have several components but are managed in a complex cultural landscape where “ideas and values are contradictory when brought together in concrete situations” (Gullestad, 1984, p. 21). Beyond being attached to individuals and groups, identities are connected to institutions (Jenkins, 2014). Institutions are a source to identity and accommodate multiple identities (Jenkins, 2014). For example, marriage as an institution facilitates identities such as life partners, divorced, and widowed. Schools, on the contrary, accommodate identities such as good student or dropout, as well as disciplined, natural learner, and troublemaker. Identities are not solely managed by the individual but are maintained and altered in social interactions. Those we go into social interaction with contribute to shape identities, referred to by some as labeling (Becker, 1973) or framing (Fine, 1991) when identifying happens in power-imbalanced interactions.

Two institutions which are given particular importance by the storyteller are school and the nuclear family. These institutions are culturally linked to different spaces. The nuclear family is in the Norwegian context often linked to a place referred to as home and has the form of a house or an apartment. The school is linked to a school building with classrooms and a schoolyard. This does not mean that identities attached to these institutions and places are completely separate (Jenkins, 2014). A student brings identities linked to their student role to the home, and vice versa, identities linked to the family are present in the classroom and in the schoolyard.

Everyday life in Norway is saturated by education (Bunting & Moshuus, 2017a). To underscore the gained status and wide-spread impact of education, scholars have suggested the terms “the knowledge society” (Frønes, 2016) and “the schooled society” (Baker, 2014). Young people’s exclusion from education and work is set within a risk-discourse (see, for example, Frøyland et al., 2022; Normann & Hetland, 2021; Strand et al., 2015) and is actively sought to be prevented (Meld. St. 32 [2020-2021]; Meld. St. 21 [2020-2021]; Thøgersen, 2023).

In addition to the societal impact of education, technical and digital solutions available have, within a short timeframe, become embedded in everyday life (Myrczik et al., 2026) and the home arena (Venkatesh, 2008), challenging understandings of home and society (Lynch & Sweeney, 2024). Digital paperwork has become commonplace in Norway: forms that were once filled in at an office building staffed by social workers are now filled in at home (Logan, 2010). This change is a result of rapid technological development followed by digitalization and an implemented strategy by NAV (Meld. St. 32 [2020-2021]). Forms issued by NAV, as well as other digital paperwork provided by, for example, banks, employers, insurance companies, schools, governments, or municipalities require a certain level of “know how” and the individual cannot remain indifferent to the task (Bønnhoff, 2019; Midtgård et al., 2022). The form considered in this case requires action from the storyteller. She cannot decide not to complete the form without consequences. Despite the wide-spread use of digital solutions for communication in NAV, Fuglevik and Hansen (2024) show that the perspective of the user of the digital solutions is under-researched in comparison to the more wide-spread method of interviewing employees about their observations and evaluations of users’ experiences.

Boundaries, Public and Private Spheres

The home and the school can be understood as private and public spheres (Arendt, 1958; Habermas,1992). The spheres are separated by boundaries, and these boundaries can be understood to be porous to allow information to move between spheres (Habermas, 1992). The understanding of spatial openness/closure is not reserved for understanding the dichotomy of private and public spheres but is continuously relevant, as a boundary’s openness/closure is not absolute but is governed by social practices, relationships, and power (Massey, 2005, pp. 163–166). More recent research has made use of, and further developed the understanding of boundaries in a broad field of research, ranging from young people’s use of place (Abbott-Chapman & Robertson, 2009), the symbolic meanings of walls (McKee, 2013), the use of language to negotiate public space (Polese et al., 2019), porosity in the boundaries in urban contexts (Jovchelovitch et al., 2020) to porous walls in a classroom setting, with a mixed student group (Davis & White, 2012). The fast-paced development of new technology combined with digitalization has transformed the boundaries between the home and society, maintaining the actualization of porosity (Lynch & Sweeney, 2024; Steiner & Veel, 2017; Thompson, 2011).

In Arendt’s (1958) distinction between the private and public spheres of the ancient Greeks, the private sphere was a place of necessity and practicalities rather than one of inspiration, enlightenment, and activities. This conceptualization stands in contrast to the private sphere, the Norwegian home, studied and described by Gullestad (1979, 1984, 1989) and other anthropologists (Hollos, 1974; Holtedahl, 1986; Solheim, 1998), who brought the home to the center stage, providing inspired academic contributions to the knowledge of the everyday lives of women in the 1970s and 1980s in Norway.

Like Arendt, however, Gullestad (1989) acknowledges that there is a contrast between the home and public sphere, but for other reasons than those proposed by Arendt. To Gullestad (1989), the home represents the intimate, private, holistic, and personal as opposed to the bureaucratic, factual, efficient, and specialized; an oasis being the last stronghold against interference. Steiner and Veel (2017) claim that the home as a “closed container, sharply separated from the world outside” (p. 74) is an ongoing cultural idea, but that the idea of the home as an oasis shielded from interference from the public sphere might be a cultural perception more than reality. This observation is supported by E. Olsen (1985) when she writes that the public sphere might not intervene directly and physically in the home, but the state’s laws and regulations have a direct effect on relationships in the home and regulate the housing market, water and electricity systems, etc.

Easthope suggests defining home as a “particularly significant type of place with which, and within which, we experience strong social, psychological and emotive attachments. The home is also understood as an open place, maintained and developed through the social relations that stretch beyond it” (Easthope, 2004, p. 136). The second part of Easthope’s definition introduces porosity, as home is a place that is open and is developed and maintained by social relationships that are located beyond or outside of the significant place.

Douglas (1991) understands the home as a realization of ideas and, in line with Easthope, suggests that it is localizable: “home starts by bringing some space under control” (p. 289). If the home is a space that is controlled, then somewhere else must exist—a space that is not controlled—that is not the home. The theoretical frameworks of these scholars probe the question; can a place be both porous and remain under control? And how does porousness and control play out in everyday identity management, with home as its indirect center?

A Case Study

The study is designed as a case study, using empirical data to investigate a phenomenon in its real-life context (Yin, 2009, p. 18). The dialogue is from an interview from 2021, carried out as part of a longitudinal qualitative study called “Young people, education and early school leaving in Telemark” (UngSA) (Bunting & Moshuus, 2017b; Moshuus et al., 2019). The 74 young people recruited to join UngSA in 2013–2014 as participants were, at the time, at risk of experiencing early school leaving or, like Charlotte, had already left school and were unemployed. The data collection is ongoing, and over the last 12 years, project members and master students have conducted 213 interviews. The number of interviews with the participants, at this point in the data collection, ranges from one to six interviews. The interviews are supplied with a field note written by the interviewer shortly after the interview.

Merriam (1998) writes that a case study design can facilitate answers to questions that have not been asked. The concept of “answers to questions that have not been asked” is also at the core of the indirect approach used to conduct the interviews in UngSA (Moshuus & Eide, 2016). Moshuus and Eide showcase how contextual insights are more likely to happen when the researcher takes a step back, and the participants share experiences from their point of view, as opposed to the lens of the researcher’s questions. In the attempt to achieve this, the interview is mainly led by the participant’s point of interest and brought forward by follow-up questions from the interviewer.

In the dialogue titled “Digital Paperwork,” the participant addresses a topic, communication with NAV, that is often touched upon in UngSA interviews, yet her reaction and the outcome deviate from experiences shared by other participants. Charlotte’s story enables an in-depth study of a phenomenon in a set context (Flyvbjerg, 2006). Filling in digital paperwork is, in the grand scheme, a mundane task, and “mundane cases tend to offer a researcher the license to explore freely while despite, or maybe because of, their mundanity, they may generate surprising lessons” (Heuts & Mol, 2013, p. 127). In line with Heuts and Mol, in this dialogue, it is the mundane that forms the baseline from which we can discover the informant’s contextual knowledge and explore her interpretative work, uncovering that it is not the paperwork per se that is given meaning, but what affect it has on her, through unlocking former school experiences in a new context.

To explore Charlotte’s work as a storyteller and her meaning-making, I use narrative methodology (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009; Riessman, 2008). Charlotte weaves her own thoughts and explanations into the story; a narrative element Labov (1972) calls evaluation, which occurs when the storyteller leaves the storyline to add their own understanding of meaning and to communicate emotions. The evaluation performed by the storyteller is referred to by Riessman (2008) as the “soul” of a narrative (p. 84). In addition to evaluation, I use the concept of linkage to explore Charlotte’s meaning-making. Linkage is the connections made by the storytellers when telling their story. According to Gubrium and Holstein (2009), “[. . .] no item of experience is meaningful in its own right. It is made meaningful through the particular ways it is linked to other items. Linkage creates a context for understanding” (p. 54).

There are limitations to this study. This case study only describes the retelling of an experience by one person. Also, the overarching study, UngSA, from which this dialogue derives from, does not primarily address either home or digital forms, but these themes, as well as roles, relationships, and identity, emerge in the meaning-making of the storyteller. This narrative is unique. However, it highlights the porous quality of the home’s boundaries in a digital, schooled society and school’s presence across time and space, affecting identity management and relationships.

I will go on to present the storyteller and the dialogue subject to the upcoming analyses and discussion.

Digital Paperwork

Charlotte is a young woman who grew up in a working-class family in a small village in South-Eastern Norway. Her immediate family consists of her mother, father, and older brother. She is very fond of her family, but she often disagrees with them and is not afraid to voice her opinion. Growing up in a small community, she didn’t feel like she “fit in,” and she found herself in reoccurring conflicts with teachers and peers in school. Charlotte can be both philosophical and contrary. In one of her interviews, she says she would happily read the bible as a child, to be able to ask their teacher in religious studies tricky questions.

Initially, Charlotte didn’t complete her vocational training in upper secondary school and spent her days at home, as, having no qualifications, she did not find paid employment. The year after, she decided to give upper secondary education one more try, concluding that graduating would be a necessary step to do the kind of work she wanted, a job position in which she could make a difference in people’s lives.

The dialogue is from the fourth interview with Charlotte, conducted in October 2021. The first three interviews with Charlotte are conducted by my colleague, and the fourth interview is conducted by me. At the time I met her for the fourth interview, Charlotte was 27 years old and mother to two young children. She had recently bought a house together with her husband. Prior to the passage that follows, Charlotte has just told me that if she is to do paperwork, her husband will back out of the room, make up an excuse to stay out, and return when he feels certain that she has finished the paperwork. She continues by saying that she sometimes struggles to concentrate and that doing paperwork makes her temperamental. Following this, she claims that this was the case in upper secondary school too, where she had to concentrate despite the constant flow of distractions in the classroom. While trying to concentrate in her everyday school environment, she found a technique to manage, namely, by yelling at herself. I follow up on this by asking:

I:

But you say it’s still like that, if you have to do paperwork, then you can get temperamental?

C:

Yes. But I always make sure to do it [paperwork] when the kids are not home.

I:

Yes.

C:

Because I’m not a mother who yells. I usually say, “It’s not allowed because such and such and such.” But I’m absolutely sure that if I had sat with it [paperwork], and my son had come and asked questions while I was doing something like that, I don’t think I would have had that tone.

I:

No.

C:

Then I think that I would have responded more like “Can you go away?!” [. . .] I know that with my husband

I:

Yeah.

C:

I think of violence.

In the lead-up to this dialogue, she has already told me that doing paperwork angers her. It somehow instantly changes her mood. This instant reaction is an exception to her everyday parenting style, as she is not a mother who yells. She goes on to say that she prefers to explain things to her children as an alternative to yelling. When it comes to her husband, however, she thinks of violence, underlying the acuteness and physical nature of the feeling she gets from paperwork. She knows paperwork makes her agitated; this is not news to her. Moreover, as she is aware of its effect on her, she can take action to avoid unfortunate situations. It is from this point that we depart straight into the retelling of a recent episode:

C:

He sits there, and he just sits and watches TV or is gaming. He isn’t usually gaming much, but this time he was so . . . so . . . so foolish [in air quotes].

I:

[laughs]

C:

that he sat down and thought he could do something while I had to fill in the papers online [. . .] I just picked up the laptop and I went down stairs to the cellar ¹

I:

Yes.

C:

and sat there [in the living room in the lower level of the house]. It would have gone well

I:

Yeah.

C:

but then he thought “maybe she is stressed out? Should I go and help her?”

I:

Yes.

C:

Yes.

I:

Yes.

C:

And he has been with me for a few years, so [after the event] he said, “I knew it was a stupid idea.” [Laughs a little]. “I actually knew in my head that it wasn’t a good idea.” So he came down and said, “love, is there anything I can do?” And I replied “Is there anything you can help me with? Yes, you can get the hell out of the house! You can also go for a drive, and you don’t have to come home today”! [Laughs a little]. And he got into the car [more laughter] and he’s never heard me yell before, so he, he just got in [the car] and drove off. And he sent me a text message at seven in the evening, [laughs a little] “Hello.” And I called, and I [said], “sorry, sorry.” I had sent him a text message earlier in the evening, telling him that I was sorry. Because I didn’t mean for it to it affect him, but . . .

In her retelling of this event, her husband was watching TV. According to Charlotte, this is not part of his ordinary routine, but he happened to be doing so on this day. It is implied that Charlotte found this annoying, as she adds, “this day he was so . . . so. . . so foolish.” She accompanies this statement by making the sign “air quotes” with her hands. In the Norwegian language, this sign is often used to signal that the expression used is caricatured, implying that it was not the activity that was the problem, but that she was already agitated. The sentence “I just picked up the laptop and I went down stairs to the cellar” indicate some urgency in her decision to embark on her task. In the build-up to the plot of the story, she says, “and [I] sat there (in the living room located on the lower floor of the house). It would have gone well.” Then, however, her husband comes to ask if she needed any help.

At this point in the recollection, Charlotte leaves the storyline to evaluate. Charlotte and her husband have been a couple for a while, and thus, he should know to leave her to her herself. By offering this information, she suggests that she is not the only one to blame for what followed. She underscores this point by giving voice to his part of a conversation that took place after this incident: “I knew it was a stupid idea.” Her husband should have known not to ask, and by asking, she understands his involvement as the trigger of escalation. Charlotte continues:

C:

So I think . . . my mom says that “you have become so calm over the last years.” Yes, because I wasn’t in school anymore! Because I no longer had that anger towards everything around me.

I:

No.

C:

Eh, of course I’m not really a temperamental person.

I:

No.

In a few sentences, closing her story, Charlotte makes two important points. First, she makes a direct linkage to school after telling her story. She ties the anger, or more accurate, the lack of anger, to no longer being in school. By doing so, she is also offering evaluation, as she is making the linkage: a context for us to understand her story. She shows how this makes sense from her point of view. Second, she ties the end of the story back to where it started. She is closing the story with what can be understood as a coda (Labov, 1972), giving a statement that guards her against follow-up questions: she is not really a temperamental person. She derives reliability through introducing a new character, someone who knows her well: she is calmer now, not according to herself, but as observed by someone else, her mother.

When the final passage of the conversation is read, the longitudinal properties of the four interviews with Charlotte become particularly useful. Charlotte’s school experiences create a colorful background for the scene she is drawing. In previous interviews, she has shared stories about feeling different to the other students and that she struggled to catalyze her academic and social potential in school settings, often resulting in conflicts and frustration. Paperwork performed on a computer does not have to be linked to school. But rather than, for example, making linkages based on the theme of this specific paperwork, to formalize financial support from her ex-partner and the father of her oldest child, she understands the situation based on former school-related experiences. The storyline addresses her dealing with paperwork, which she cannot stand, while the explanatory track is based on her experiences in school as a child and a teenager. This linkage creates a context for understanding this case (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009, p. 59).

A Complex and Unclear Situation

As Charlotte is filling in the digital form, she can be understood to be in a temporary situation with similar qualities to liminal phases (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009). A situation can be referred to as liminal when “meaning production is especially complex and unclear [and] where roles, relationships, and identities are particularly uncertain and problematic” (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009, pp. 59–60). To unpack the complexity and lack of clarity in the situation, I will map the roles, relationships, and identities that surface in the story.

Charlotte presents several roles that she holds. She introduces her everyday roles as a mother and as a wife. In addition to these roles, the role as an ex-partner and co-parent becomes evident, as do those of a daughter and a member of the Norwegian welfare state. Of these, the roles to which Charlotte devotes distinctive time and attention are those of mother and wife. Finally, she introduces a role from the past, namely, her role as a student.

In the storyline, Charlotte mentions relationships with her children and her husband. In her evaluation, she also includes her mother. Charlotte is giving some clues about her identity as a mother and a wife when she leaves the storyline to evaluate. First, she is not a mother who yells, and second, she has not “thrown” her husband out of the house up until this point.

When leaving the storyline to evaluate, Charlotte creates a framework within which she can find meaning. Her reactions, which we know from the storyline, do not make sense in her everyday life at the present time; they do, however, make sense when she looks back in time. She can recognize the feelings from her former role as a student. However, even with the reactions tied to and given meaning through her role as a student, Charlotte is left with an unsolvable challenge: the immediate feelings and reactions, which belong to a different role in a different arena at a different time, are not suitably combined with her current roles, identities, and relationships. To develop this train of thought, we can visualize that temporarily, her former identity as a student at school is present in the home.

When private life crosses the boundary and is made public, it affects both the public and the private spheres (Thompson, 2011). Thompson makes this argument with an example in which privacy is made public through newspaper articles in the United Kingdom regarding the financial expenditure of politicians that is refunded from public taxes. What is regarded as belonging to a private sphere is introduced to the public. In the story told by Charlotte, the opposite occurs. As we have read, Charlotte is filling in a digital form on her personal computer at home. In this task, the computer can be understood to be a mediating device (Venkatesh, 2008), introducing the public, represented by the paperwork provided by NAV through technological solutions enabling forms to be filled in digitally, into Charlotte’s private sphere.

In doing this task, a feeling that, for Charlotte, is associated with a role and identity she has had in a public setting, namely, school, is present in her private sphere. As this occurs, a piece of the public sphere can be understood to be exposed within the boundaries of her private sphere. Unlike the example used by Thompson, the information needed in the paperwork provided by NAV is not collected for the purpose of public exposure. However, his description of “the political consequences of these revelations (being) both dramatic and immediate” (2011, p. 66) fits this case as well, as the consequences for Charlotte can be said to be both dramatic and immediate.

The dramatic and immediateness of the situation might partly be understood as a consequence of the home as an oasis, where the individual is in control (Douglas, 1991), is threatened. Something that is “not home” is temporarily present within the home through the linkage made between paperwork and her experiences at school. Building on her experience and anticipation, Charlotte made plans and organized in advance, to optimize the situation (Douglas, 1991, p. 295) as she knows that she has a demanding task ahead of her, and she anticipates that she will feel uneasy carrying it out. This knowledge equips her to act in order to maintain control. Her first action is to take the necessary steps for her children to be out of the house. Her second step is to move herself away from the space her husband is in. However, despite her efforts to stay in control, she ends up not being in control of either the situation or in the space she is in. The complicating action (Labov, 1972; Riessman, 2008, p. 3), understood as the moment her husband enters the space she is in to ask if she needs any help, leads to Charlotte’s final attempt to maintain a minimum of control as she throws him out of the house. In her attempt to stay in control, through calculated actions and as a result of immediate frustration, Charlotte is temporary the only one home.

In Arendt’s (1958, p. 50) description of the public sphere in ancient Greece, the real life of the public sphere is made so mainly because it is public: it is observed by other people. The publicity of a conversation or debate makes the happening real, and the realness of the happening is also made more valid to the individual. This is set as a contrast to the home, where actions are not observed and thus can be understood as made less real, including to the individual performing them. In Charlotte’s story, the conflicting roles and identities, with her children and eventually also her husband out of the house, are not seen and made “made real” by anyone but Charlotte. There is no one else left in the home to observe and validate the situation apart from Charlotte. Charlotte’s “clash” of roles and identities from the past and the present, attached to school and to home, remains unmanaged and unclear. In this aspect, the solid qualities of the boundaries between the private and public spheres become prominent.

Storytelling and Identity Management

This point leads us to how Charlotte tells her story and how her role as a storyteller enables her to manage her identity in the interview setting. When leaving the storyline to evaluate, Charlotte refers to what she is not, rather than what she is (Bamberg, 2012), claiming that she “is not a mother who yells” and that her husband “has never heard me yell before.” What is a wife and mother ‘who doesn’t yell’ in a Norwegian context, and why is this important for Charlotte to get across? According to Frykman & Löfgren (1987), to be a calm mother and wife in control of her emotions while gently caring for her family has, for generations, been the middle-class ideal for mothers in a Scandinavian context. An increasing degree of risk discourses is also reflected in the parenting style, meaning that parenting and caregiving are acted out as preventive, as parents should protect their children from, and reduce, potential risk, as well as prepare their children to manage or avoid potential risks in the future (Ulvik 2019, p. 149; Hennum, 2016; Official Norwegian report [NOU] 2012, 5). According to Haldar and Røsvik (2020), moreover, the Norwegian cultural ideal for a mother is to be a facilitator of togetherness and coziness in an active family life.

Calmness, to be in emotional control, caring, risk assessment, and facilitating family togetherness and coziness are all ideals that are present in the storyline and in the evaluation. Charlotte’s planning and attentiveness in ensuring that the children are out of the house can be understood as risk assessment. She wants to shield her children from her reaction, as she desires to avoid a situation where her response to their questions deviates from her usual style of interactions in a way she considers to be undesirable. Her decision to leave the room her husband is in can also be understood as a preventive action, as she knows from experience that the task she is set out to do will promote neither togetherness nor coziness, as she is likely to experience both lack of calmness and control of her emotions.

Now to the question of why it is important to Charlotte to communicate what she “is not.” Gullestad (1984) observed conversations among young mothers in an urban context as a starting point to study their identity management. Treating identity as a relational concept where several identities can be intertwined across relationships, Gullestad found identities interlinked with roles and positions in one context to be relevant in other sets of contexts and relationships. This was particularly true for the identities attached to the roles of mother and wife. The women’s roles as mother and wife were recurring topics of conversation and subject to discussions and evaluation. The identity attached to their roles as mother and wife was not only managed in the primary relationships creating these roles but was also managed in interactions between friends. How the young women were thought to perform the identities as mother or wife was of great importance to how they were perceived in the friend group.

This observation made by Gullestad may illuminate Charlotte’s choice to open her story by letting me know “what she is not.” Charlotte and I are not friends like the women conversing in “The kitchen table society.” However, we are of similar age and mothers to young children. Coincidentally, we spent our teenage years in the same geographical areas, share references to places and landmarks, probably people too, if we were to ask each other about mutual acquaintances. To clarify to me how she performs her role as a mother and the knowledge that this might shape my impression of her, seems to be of importance to Charlotte. And how she performs her role as a mother is of importance to herself too. Charlotte uses the social interaction to clarify her identity, as the cultural ideas attached to the roles of mother and wife are not compatible with her role as a student—or, her identity as a mother and wife is not compatible with her identity as a student. The identity attached to her role as a student belongs to another place and creates a “mess” where it does not belong.

This ties back to dominant cultural ideas of what it means to be a good mother and wife, and to the central position education holds in the Norwegian society, two significant elements of the greater context of Charlotte’s story (Bamberg, 2012). Through four interviews with Charlotte, her reflections on experiences in primary, secondary, and upper secondary school form a pattern. She has been labeled with, and acted out, identities with negative connotations in a school setting. She has also been labeled as a “drop out,” the “great scare” in a schooled society. Charlotte seems to be still managing labels collected through her school years.

By sharing her story and adding evaluation, Charlotte brings forward an experience that otherwise could have remained “unseen,” making the experience “real” in the sense that it is shared and observed. Bringing her experience from the realm of the private into the public sphere, presented by the interview setting, Charlotte uses the opportunity to reclaim control by managing her identity both for herself and for me, the listener, contrary to when the situation described occurred, “hidden from view” from the confirming public eye. Her storytelling skills facilitate a clarifying of the layers in what can be understood as a complex and unclear situation and thus reclaiming a sense of control of her identity and her home.

Conclusion

This case study shows how temporary loss of control due to a role and identity that enters the home not only affects the storyteller’s understanding of herself but also her relationships connected to home. The porous qualities of the home’s boundaries allow for passage of roles and identities, not only from another place but also from another time. When control ceases, the liminality that emerges in the void affects the storyteller’s ability to make coherent meaning in her roles, relationships, and identities. Rooted in the analysis of Charlotte’s narrative, Gullestad’s understanding of home as the indirect center of everyday life, where people find coherent meaning in their divergent roles and participation in multiple arenas, requires a certain experience of control. However, Charlotte’s narrative suggests that control was temporarily lost, implying that a sense of control was present prior to the narrated event. Both the storyline and the presentation of the narrative suggest that control was regained after the event. Charlotte got to say her “I’m sorry’s,” her husband came back home, and Charlotte is telling the story as an incident, as opposed to an ongoing situation. This shows that the porous quality of the boundaries of home doesn’t constantly challenge the individual’s sense of control in the home, but that it holds this ability, and that when the boundaries are crossed, it may have a dramatic and immediate impact on the home understood as an indirect center of everyday life, in which people make coherent meaning, managing their roles, identities, and relationships.