Welcome Home!

Welcome home to our Rebecca!  Rebecca has come home to live for the next year after four years away in Ontario.  After a very long day with snowy delays in both Toronto and Calgary I finally had a chance to hug my daughter.  Later I sat on her bed in her makeshift corner of our playroom that she wants to call her own.  She put away books, folded clothes and seemed so glad to finally be home even though I know it has also been hard to leave special friends and places from the last four years away.

Seeing Rebecca's joy and peace even after several days without sleep, I realized afresh that it has not been easy for her tender spirit to leave and set up home so far away year after year.  There is something very grounding about being in the heart of home where we are loved and accepted  and cherished just because.

Some of my children have never known that deep sense of home.  There have never been open arms of gentle love and acceptance, cherishing and caring from birth.  There is a deep sense of empty abandonment and homelessness that cannot be consciously or easily filled.  Gabor Mate talks about those hungry ghosts.  I feel them in some of the empty moments of my younger children.  They do not naturally think of coming to me to meet their needs.  They are deeply wired to 'go it alone.'  They have developed their own ways of coping that often emerge in behaviours that further alienate and distance them from others.  They do not have a natural sense of being treasured by a  mother or father or resting in peace at home.  Even allowing a mother and a permanent home into their hearts involves conscious effort and work for them.  One daughter recently drew a branch being blown about randomly in the wind.  At a deep and primal level she feels like that bare branch, alone and disconnected.

Day after day, month after month and year after year I am hopeful that our younger children will one day feel at home in my love.  It may always look different for them as the very template of their hearts and souls has been shaped in some very lonely ways.  Still, I trust God and the Gift in all ways.  I do believe that there is hope for us all to be deeply welcomed home in the arms of others and ultimately in the home of God's heart with its varied and expansive rooms of deep peace and loving rest.