Going Home

Christmas celebrations remind me of painful childhood memories that I carried with me for far too long. An angry separation and subsequent divorce, alcoholic step-dads, and crashing in the basements of high school friends rather than family made me feel like I didn’t belong. Instead of voicing the shame that carried with me as a result, I hid it away inside. I told no one, but I never really felt like I had a place of my own, a place to call home.

For all of the above, we’ve (Mr. GBY and I) worked hard to create a real home for our own children. I’ve also worked hard to let go of the unhealthy beliefs and coping mechanisms of those years of my life. Yet, every year as Christmas approaches, I begin to feel the weight and dread of that old, familiar feeling—that I don’t have a place to go home to. I am surrounded by family and friends that love and care for me, people that would do anything I asked or needed of them. I’m so grateful for that. And still, there won’t ever be a doorknob from my childhood that I can turn and say, “I’m home!” There is not some weird room in some creepy basement somewhere with teen heartthrob pictures still on the walls waiting for me, where the light is always on and the door’s always open.

I know I’m not the only one. At holiday celebrations in rooms full of people and busy chatter, I can look around the room and know that I’m not the only one that feels more alone, amongst so many people, than connected.

There’s been a lesson in this, one that’s taken so long to learn, that maybe I’ll never master. It’s a lesson on where home truly is.

Here’s the truth, the society we live in has an unhealthy fascination with fitting in. We sometimes call that belonging, but that’s mislabeling. Many of us want to fit in so badly that we build our adult lives around doing and being what we think society tells us we should be. We forget to ask ourselves what we really want, who we truly are. We do all the jobs and buy all the things we think we should. We think these things will make us happy, that they will make us belong.

When I was diagnosed with multiple chronic illnesses, we were forced to ask ourselves questions we may not have otherwise. Being confronted with my own mortality made us dig deep and do some hard work on ourselves. That led to taking many actions that were outside the norm. We started going against the flow. Asking ourselves what we really wanted may have made us the weird neighbors, the ones that have a front-yard garden and backyard chickens; the ones that homeschool their kids and don’t pull their weeds; the people who quit their jobs and take extended trips to third-world countries rather than Disney World vacations (We may go there too sometime.).