family love

It’s been a pretty good week. Balanced, peaceful and productive. Had a successful meeting with the youth group and a good meeting with my girls group as well. We made Irish Potato Candies and then we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with some fun games in class the next day. Then on Thursday I visited with the religion teacher who lives in Frailes and comes to give classes once a week. His daughter is in high school and needed some help with her English homework. Unfortunately she's enrolled in a technical highschool and is taking something like accounting in English and needed help on how to say and understand really big numbers. Like 18 digits. Does anyone even know what this number is: 100,000,000,000,000,000? Because I do not.

Although things are going well homesickness is definitely more of an issue, more on my mind this year. Maybe I’m still sort of settling in to this new year. I’m not homesick for food or anything, not for the lifestyle I have in the US. In fact I barely remember what it’s like to cook and eat my own food, drive a car or flush my toilet paper. I’m homesick for my family. I’m missing out on time with people I love and who love me. Maybe its just homesickness or maybe distance really does make the heart grow fonder. Maybe we just want what we don’t have. Or maybe being away, alone, surrounded by the unknown, has planted new seeds of gratitude for the unconditional love of friends and family who know you and love you anyways. As Anne Lamott says about families in her book “Traveling Mercies”:

…when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much. And that gives us license to try on that radical hat of liberation, the hat of self-acceptance; we’re allowed to escape from underneath from one of the fatwas.

So while I’ve certainly grown in many ways and am experiencing new freedoms and having adventures, I miss home. There’s something to be said for spending time with people who already love you despite yourself, who you don’t have to prove anything to, who understand you and know where you’re coming from because they were there with you.