Come Home to Yourself

I had forgotten what it felt like to cook together. Our lives since we had children had become compartmentalized and expedient: you take them to their lesson and I will cook dinner. You get the groceries and I will cook dinner. You deal with homework and I will cook dinner. Over the years, we have alternated the cooking between us, taking turns. And when Feliks arrived, we were just trying to survive his 5-6 hours of screaming a day. Dinner became sheer exhaustion.

So this past weekend when John and I found ourselves in the kitchen cooking a new recipe for dinner together—I’ll string the beans if you can chop the onion, it was a beautiful dance. We were making a fancy Sunday dinner and we accomplished that together. I felt the beauty of that in the moment, and it lingered.

When you have a special needs child, especially rare are these moments together. Our social life reduced to a small dot once Feliks was born because we could neither take him out or hire a babysitter for him, so explosive and unpredictable were his meltdowns. We took turns with him because we each desperately needed a break.

It feels like we have been two satellites hovering around each other in a dance of survival and efficiency for so long. Cooking dinner together, and running to the garden for cherry tomatoes still warm from the sun, felt like coming home to one another again.

This coming home is also a coming home to ourselves. When I teach writing, I feel like I am coming home to myself. This past weekend, I co-facilitated a writing retreat for the “In the Rough” two-year writing program I started with Julie Gieseke. I realized again just how alive that makes me feel and how often I have been dancing a dance of survival and efficiency in my work rather than coming home to my soul work.

Whether it is coming home to a loved one or to yourself, make that journey this week. Know what brings you joy and walk toward that.