Homesick

That’s NOT true, protests my Internal Editor.  I feel right at home wherever I am.

But the words, even though they have some ring of truth, sound hollow even to the Critic.

The truth is, on an average day I don’t experience the raw uncensored misery of my child on her maiden voyage far away from home.  But, without overreaching my boundaries, I dare say that all of us are plagued by this sickness in one degree or another. I am not an exception. 

You don’t have to live a million miles away from your place of origin.  You don’t have to be in a different country or on a different continent. People around you may all speak the same language but one can still feel homesick. One can still experience the loneliness of feeling out-of-place.

 If I am honest with myself, I would admit that it took being immersed in my child’s anguish to connect with my own being-out-of-place grief.

Being at home means some of the same, and a little different things for each of us.  It spans diverse landscape of locations and relationships, habits and routines, vocational calling and skills.

Most of us learn about this ‘being at home’ feeling in a certain location, specific address, with precise GPS coordinates.  We know the layout of the rooms, how the furniture is arranged, so we can safely navigate it even in complete darkness.  It’s the familiarity that provides sense of safety and stability we all need, but some of us feel that need more than others.

Take us out of that place, and the ground under our feet starts to shift.  The familiarity is gone.  The stability is gone, along with the sense of safety.  Even the simplest daily tasks require effort and create seemingly unnecessary stress.  Everything is different – the door knobs, the toilets, the faucets, the electric outlets, the food that we eat, the seating arrangements around the table…

But, it goes beyond, way beyond all of that. What used to be effortless now demands – and drains - all my mental and emotional powers.

We shut down to everything except for one five-word statement:

I want to go HOME...