almost (but not quite) home…
My 16 year old niece has been travelling in Europe with a music group and by all accounts having a fabulous time. Recently she posted a lament on her facebook page: “There’s only about one week left 
why must this come to an end?” Simultaneously her mother (not in Europe) posts: “(My daughter) comes home soon….yeah!!!!”. I smiled at the parallel truths. My niece doesn’t want the trip to end, for her mom it can’t end soon enough.
For the treasure of meeting new friends in faraway lands, there are familiar friends back home from whom we are separated. With the delight of a new adventure in life, there are inevitably roads not taken and an invitation to wistfulness. Each hello is also a good bye, each farewell a new beginning.
Truly the choices represented by the doorways in our lives can be paralyzing. Stymied by the choice to go or stay, we often choose stuck in between. I think this is the essence of what Catholics once understood as purgatory: a place of suspended animation, aware of life around you but unable to participate. Some doorways beckon with a powerful magnetism; we gravitate to and through and hardly realize that a choice has been made until the past is but a distant whisper. Tragically sometimes life throws us down paths we would never choose to go. Still other times doorways taunt us with competing claims of possibility and peril. Years ago a mentor told me that life is filled not with rights and wrongs so much as choices and consequences. Believing this bit of wisdom, I have moved through some doorways with great ambivalence.
Regardless the doorway, there is much truth on either side and wisdom recognizes the abundance. This both-and nature is the essence of the perennial question of whether the glass is half full or half empty. Because I tend to be a half-empty kind of gal, I was moved several years ago to read a third interpretation of the half-glass metaphor. The glass might be neither half empty nor half full but rather the wrong size. Perhaps we look at these dual truths with the wrong size glass, as if only one can be true.
Recently I’ve been holding in prayer a friend whose family is facing a tragic situation. What amazes me about my friend’s countenance is not the grief, this I expect. What catches my breath is her ability to hold the grief in tandem with the celebrations that are also unfolding in her family. Facing the dual truths of half full and half empty, she has begun the earnest search for a glass that fits.
Perhaps this is all relevant in a new way for me as my firstborn packs for sleepaway college. She’s always been a homebody and a three-week trip away last summer was huge. This is big stuff for us. But when I recognize the truth’s rightful place, held in tandem with that of all the changes we’ve weathered in recent years, my countenance eases. Ready or not we’ve been learning that family is defined not by geography or bloodlines but by habits of the heart. My firstborn is great with words and I look forward to meeting her in new ways as we learn to pen our thoughts back and forth, a new glass.
Although not ready to return, my niece had apparently sent an SOS for cash. Her mother posts: “Don’t worry about your balance on card. You are doing great I added more so you wouldn’t worry.” Before I could think better of it, I typed a request for her mom to add more to my card! The laughter, of course, is rooted in the companion (read: hard) truth that sometimes we do reach our credit limit. The size of the glass (and our expectation) matters.
Soon my niece will be home; she will be sad and her mother happy. She will be happily surrounded by her homies while wistful for her travelling companions. With a right-sized glasses mother and daughter will cherish life together.
