{"id":168,"date":"2010-12-04T15:17:00","date_gmt":"2010-12-04T15:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/permissiontolive\/2010\/12\/home-again\/"},"modified":"2010-12-04T15:17:00","modified_gmt":"2010-12-04T15:17:00","slug":"home-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/permissiontolive\/2010\/12\/home-again.html","title":{"rendered":"Home Again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/div>\n

Wow<\/span>, it feels like we were gone a month. <\/p>\n

Enough happened on this trip to make it a pretty miserable experience. We had some tense moments with family, including two instances where I lost my cool. I saw siblings being punished for meaningless reasons. I saw my kids requests or interests get ignored by little aunts and uncles who don\u2019t know what it means to have their own interests or requests respected. I had the usual weird comments from parents on how I had \u201cbeen their most difficult child\u201d ( So um, the child who didn\u2019t drink, smoke, do drugs, go anywhere, have any friends, never dated much less became sexually active, was somehow the most difficult?)<\/em> and how they know me better than I know myself (strange how that kind of statement still kind of freaks me out).<\/em> I watched relatives at Thanksgiving Dinner make cheap shots at each other and argue about how other people should be living their lives. We got the flu (violently I might add<\/em>), missed the wedding we were\u00a0in town\u00a0for in the first place, and drove home in the wake of a terrible ice storm on a highway littered with jack-knifed semis.<\/p>\n

Like I said<\/span>, it was enough to be chalked up as a pretty bad \u201cvacation\u201d. But it was different.<\/p>\n

Usually I am the kind of person that pretends everything is OK. I retreat into my shell and become silent. I get irritable and sarcastic. I am used to being that person, especially around my family, it\u2019s how I deal with stress, it\u2019s how I deal with emotion, it was how I functioned through childhood.<\/p>\n

But in the last year, I have begun to change all of that. I\u2019ve been letting the real me out. Sometimes that scares me, but mostly it\u2019s been a very good thing. This is the first family visit where I actually let myself experience the days events as they happened, instead of bottling them inside without processing them. And this is the first time in a very long time that I have returned to my own home without immediately experiencing severe depression. <\/p>\n

This was the first time staying with my family that I wasn\u2019t overwhelmed with the guilty \u201cneed\u201d to clean every room in the house. The first time I didn\u2019t feel guilty for not cooking practically the entire Thanksgiving dinner, like I always have. I still felt sad when watching siblings get misunderstood or mistreated, but I this time I knew it wasn\u2019t my fault. I knew there was nothing I could do differently to change that. The \u201cfacebook drama\u201d<\/a> was only brought up once by my sister, and I was able to successfully deflect and \u201cagree to disagree\u201d. And while watching my Aunt and Uncle angrily on the verge of divorce, I was struck with a thankfulness that somehow through everything, my parents still love each other. <\/p>\n

I was successful<\/span> in my efforts to keep my focus on my own little family. I cleaned and fed my<\/em> kids, I kept my<\/em> living area clean. I guided my<\/em> kids, I gave my<\/em> kids and husband attention. It was hard to find the time to take good care of myself, but in keeping my<\/em> boundaries strong, I was doing just that.<\/p>\n

I admit, I am not as strong as I\u2019d like to be. It helped that I was out of the house almost the entire day that the seasonal baking was being done, otherwise I may have felt just as shamed as usual. I had to \u201cdisappear\u201d for several hours on Thanksgiving afternoon, the tension was just getting to be too much for me. Towards the end of our visit, I felt as though I was going to have a panic attack from all of the emotions I had been experiencing, thankfully a lunch date out with my husband helped me to re-center. <\/div>\n
I hope that at some point I can be the same exact person wherever I go whomever I\u2019m with. On visits to my childhood home I still struggle with shutting down into the fearful, angry, submissive person I was as a teen. But in the end, this trip was better than I anticipated. I maintained my boundaries, I focused on the needs of myself, my husband and my kids, and I was as real as I\u2019ve ever been. <\/div>\n

\u00a0 <\/p>\n

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