Neither here nor there

At the tail end of a long day of traveling from Scotland to my parents' house in the States, my four-year-old started to lose it. My mom distracted him by giving him his first taste of a GPS system. He has recently become fascinated by the idea of maps, so an animated talking map that noted our destination with a happy checkered flag was a clear winner.

Soon, every time we hopped into their minivan (a "huge car with magic doors," according to my son), we'd hear him, buckled into his seat in the corner of the back row, making sure we hadn't forgotten that he wanted to hold the GPS.

When we drove on various errands around the hills and farmlands of Pennsylvania, my mom showed my son another way by which we could locate ourselves: the small mountain range on which they live. Otherwise known as "Gran's mountain" (um, within our family only), it could be spotted above the trees and fields, a sure marker toward home.

On our airplane ride back to Scotland, my son sat next to the window, his head bobbing as he looked around intently. Finally, he confessed, "I can't see Gran's mountain anywhere." At this moment he knew for sure that Gran and Gpa were far away.

What I think he was feeling is akin to something I feel often. Looking for home.

When I was in the States, I felt for a couple weeks what it would be like to be at my nieces' and nephews' birthday parties, and for my son to have a birthday party with aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents in attendance. For my kids to have play dates with their cousins, while I chatted with my sisters. It seemed like such a luxury to me, those moments. And the time together strengthens those family bonds, though I feel the pain of it even more when it is time to leave.

And so a part of me wants to be home, thinks of "home" as where our families are, in the States. But another part of me wants to be home, thinks of "home" as Aberdeen--where I have watched my son grow from babyhood into boyhood. Where my daughter was born. It's where we have become a family ourselves and created a horde of memories. It's the only place my son knows--watching the 17 bus drive past our house, riding his bike around the park, running across the stone floor at church toward the chocolate biscuits at the back table. This part of me feels the timer counting down our time here, and I can't imagine being a family anywhere else. As my son's been telling me, "I like Scotland. When I'm big I'm still going to live here."

Some days, I feel like I don't know where I belong. I can't get my bearings on a particular "home," because home in recent years always seems to mean a place where our roots can never firmly take hold; home also means time with family in locations scattered around the States in which we have few personal ties or memories. Something inside me as a person feels very strongly that I should be able to plot "home" on a map and settle down there. But maybe that comes from an idea of a kind of life that very few people have anymore: a place where you nurture friendships and memories for decades, where your families are and continue to be, a place where you might also stick around for your older years.

Other days, I can celebrate that moving has taught me an important truth: I never knew what I could do until it was just my husband and me in a strange new place. Stuff college-aged me could never have imagined, like gaining the legal right to drive on the wrong side of the road. Forcing myself to poke holes in my own terrible shyness and instead discover that new people have all sorts of fascinating stories and information tucked inside of them. Seeing God provide for me as I could never have known if I hadn't needed so much.

When I was in the States, and wrestling with these kinds of thoughts, I happened to read an old Daily Bread sitting around my parents' house. In the February 5 entry, a couple of sentences jumped out at me: "The following were words on a sign outside a church in England: 'It doesn't matter where you live as long as you live where you are.' If God is your dwelling place, you are living where you are. If you're not content where you are, put your trust in God and thank Him for all He's given you."

I think at least one element in my struggling has been the struggle to trust God, thinking my own unmet desires for my family are what we most need, rather than trusting God's own purposes for us. Perhaps I need to grab a permanent marker and write Isaiah 49 every place I look during the day:

¹⁴ But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.”
¹⁵ “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
¹⁶ See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are ever before me.