When my husband and I first got married, we made nearly weekly trips home to visit our families. We'd pack our bags...and our dirty laundry...and make the hour long trek from Lafayette to Windfall. Even after we had kids...and our own washer and dryer...we still made the drive home more weekends than not.
There was...and is...just something about being home. It is a place where I can put my feet up and let my hair down. It is the place where I sleep the soundest...act the silliest...dream the biggest. It is the place where I am able to laugh the hardest...cry the most earnestly...speak my mind the most freely...and be myself completely, knowing that even if I rub someone wrong, they will love me just the same. And for quite some time after I was married, that place...home...was still my parents' house.
But somewhere along the way, home became a completely different place. It was no longer where I grew up, where I learned right from wrong or where I relished the safety and security my mom and dad always provided. I'm not sure when it happened exactly, perhaps because it happened so gradually that I barely noticed at the time, but happen it did.
At some point, home became our house...our home. I don't think there was a magical moment, no grand aha, that caused this transformation. But there definitely was a time when my preference became being in my own house with my own husband and my own children. There came a time when the family I was born into...my mom and dad, sisters and brother...moved to the periphery of my life while the family I was creating moved to the forefront.
And when we moved from our first home to the next, I realized something else. My home was less a physical place built with bricks and mortar and more a place built with heart and soul. It was...and is...a place more inside me than me inside it.
As the years march on, I now find myself on the outside edge of my adult children's lives. My house is no longer theirs. And slowly but surely, my home isn't theirs anymore either. They, like my husband and I so many years ago, are making their own homes with their own families. And while this is bittersweet for me, it's utter sweetness for them. And what parent wouldn't want that for their children?
So while I miss seeing their faces...miss hearing their voices...miss being a part of the ordinary day to day of their lives, I am thankful to have been part of their first family...their first home...the first place their heart was. And I hope that one day, when they reach the place in their lives where I am now, that they too will look back with as much fondness at the home they were given as children as the one they built themselves as adults.
