My mom completed her treatment and came home from Minnesota last night, and in spite of walking into a month of mail, an imminent divorce, and more, she seemed OK. It was very late in the evening, and I could see as she went through the mail that she was becoming more and more distressed, her voice tightening and her hands trembling. In the best situations coming home is a big deal. She isn’t coming home to an ideal situation.
Home for me is in many ways the kind of emotional sobriety that I usually abide in. Home is serenity, sanctuary, stability, safety. Home is the place where I can be myself; where I don’t feel like I have to meet someone else’s expectations. I haven’t been to my emotional and spiritual home since before my mom left to begin her journey there. I need to be home and I have been working to get back there with a fervor and I have only just begun to get back there.
Mom coming home hasn’t really caused me to get back here. Coming home has been the product of step work and prayer and honesty and it has been the product of how a Higher Power works in my life. In spite all I have been angry about and hurt by, coming home, coming home to that place of acceptance and forgiveness, has helped me see that I’m free now from the noose I alone created. It has been taken away, root and branch, and even though I occasionally snap back into believing that the memory of it is the thing itself, my conscience is clear. And I am free now of the intense burden and stress that I have been bearing alone for so many months; I am free of it and yet I have kept my side of the street clean.
It is clear to me, also, that I could not solve this problem on my own, that without some work and some people with whom I am able to be honest, I might yet be trapped in an emotional landscape that is a continent away from where I belong.
Now that she is back in the dangerous location where she lives, I am hopeful that my mom can keep using what she has been shown in her own journey to her real home.




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