I'm going home this summer.
I have visited my family every other year, more or less, since moving away from my hometown fifteen years ago, but this will be the first time in more years than I care to count that I will be seeing friends that I haven't spent quality time with since high school.
It feels strange. A good strange, but strange nevertheless.
Sixteen was a bad year. My parents divorced, and I lost my first real love, only to fall immediately into an unhealthy relationship that lasted nearly three years. By the time it ended, I had retreated into a tangle of self-doubt that took a long while to shake.
In my misdirected attempts at self-healing, I became an emotional nomad. I denied who I was at my center in favor of creating a version of who I wanted to be.
Along the way, I pushed some pretty amazing friends out of my life. Friends I'd had since I was in grade school. Friends I should have rightfully had well into adulthood, middle age, and beyond. Try as they might to stay with me, I became practiced at side-stepping, avoidance, being really busy or occupied with other interests, and generally moving in a direction away from where I had come from and everyone I had known.
Not an easy task in what was basically a large logging town in southwest Washington state.
Having lost my grounding, I gathered new friends, who hadn't known me early on. I married my college professor. I pretended that I was better than where I came from. I pretended I was worldly, and disinclined to acknowledge I was from working class beginnings. I espoused varied, sometimes conflicting, worldviews.
Insecurity wracked me as I made my way in the world; I felt like a fraud, because I was a fraud.
Eventually, I got it together. I finished my degree. I began really working at my career. I divorced my first husband, and remarried. I became a mom. I moved to Alabama, and became a stay-at-home mom. I'm working at being a writer, and best of all, I'm raising my kids.
I teach them: be authentic.
Don't be a chameleon. Pretending can't last, and no matter where or in what circumstance you find yourself, you are still the same person, and you are accountable for your choices.
In a world filled with chimerical personalities that shift and comply with whoever happens to be sharing their immediate space, I teach my kids to be true to themselves.
I teach them: don't shut out the people who really care about you.
The friends they've had since kindergarten, or first grade, or fifth grade: they matter. Even if they grow apart, those friends will always matter, because they matter now. The people they need someday, as they grow up and grow old, could very well be the people who knew them best when they were young.
So, this summer, you can bet I'll be celebrating the chance to reconnect with the friends of my youth. They're still here. Truly, they never left, even though I tried very hard to ignore their importance for a time.
Still apart, but always a part of me.
