Homesick and Thankfulness

Last year at Thanksgiving time, I was holding a new baby and trying to create new family traditions just for us.  This year, I’m just missing my family.  It’s funny, because they’re not even mine, they’re the Computer Guy’s, but they’re the family I had for 17 years…and I miss them. 

We were supposed to have my in laws here this week, my husband’s parents, his brother and sister in law….they had to cancel their plans and it’s just us again this year.  I keep looking for my thankfulness in a house that still doesn’t feel like home and the people we love so far away, and I’m just homesick.  I want nothing more than to be standing in my Oklahoma kitchen, with things bubbling on the stove, and the Computer Guy’s relatives popping in for a quick visit.

I want to stand in the freezing drizzle with his Aunt K on Thursday night in anticipation of Black Friday sales.  I want to watch his grandmother lightly tapping the baby’s chin until she smiles.  I want to eat his Aunt J’s green bean casserole, my favorite thing on the Thanksgiving table.  (Yum!)  Mostly though, I want to hear the voices of family tell the stories we know.  I want to feel that sense of belonging which only comes from family that know you and loves you well.

For the girl with not much family, to have one I miss so much is the unexpected gift in my life.  When I married my Computer Guy, so very long ago, there were not so many people on “my side” of the church.  The ushers were told to just even it out, but in the pictures…my side was pitifully small.  I didn’t have a lot of family, and didn’t really expect to ever have one..

and then…

his family grew to become my own.  I never could have suspected, as a terribly young new bride, exactly how much I would come to love them…or how hard it would be to leave.  As much as my heart aches to not be there this week making the traditional family dishes and hearing the traditional family stories, I am more grateful that I can say for the gift of them.  For 17 years I have been blessed to be counted among their numbers, and for that I am truly thankful.