Finding Home

Norovirus, last nights, and saying goodbye

Image by Denise Husted from Pixabay

“Maybe you should do it,” I said weakly to Danny, “so I don’t share this virus.”

He stepped in to make pasta and tomato sauce.

We had a beautiful holiday season, but last week it came to a rather abrupt ending. Norovirus saw to that. I spent the last few days before Gabby and Stephen returned to Florida for school in a nauseated haze, barely moving and sleeping intermittently on the couch. The smell of Lysol permeated our living spaces as some of us fell to sickness and others awaited their fates. 

Danny did a fine job with the pasta. I saw Stephen standing in the kitchen with a bowl of it later that evening and sighed.

“I’m sorry that the dinner on your last night at home is such a terrible one,” I said.

His fork paused in midair above the bowl. “It is?” he said.

Well no, really it was not. Like I said, Danny did a fine job. But we were supposed to have a family gathering that night, with special foods I would have been happy to prepare. (Feeding the people you love is a privilege, and last week helped me to remember that.) Something Stephen didn’t realize when I said “your last night at home,” was that I didn’t just mean the last night before he went back to school. 

I meant his last night at home.

Stephen will be getting married in May. Though we have plans to visit before then, he won’t be coming home. That Friday night was the last night he would spend in our house as just Stephen, our smart, sweet, creative, and funny son. His last night in a bunk bed, in the boys’ room upstairs, a large room that once was homebase for all five of our boys, where for years, they would go to sleep sharing stories, games, jokes, and bonding made up of things I don’t even know about. 

I turned to load the dishwasher so that no one would see me blinking back tears. I’m sure Stephen was not thinking about these things, but I was. As a mom, it feels important to do this feeling.

In some ways, as life moves on and we do it multiple times, it gets easier to say goodbye to our big kids as they grow up and take on lives of their own. We can look at some of the beautiful things happening in our oldest kids’ lives with marriages and families of their own, and see that letting go is a very good thing. 

But each child is a unique gift, and each goodbye is a unique grief. Every time guts us in its own way. We love each of our children for who they are in their own special way, and so letting go of each child is its own particular loss, and it stings.

On our way to the airport the next morning, Stephen, sitting beside me in the passenger seat, checked his phone and said, “I should be home by 4:00,” but then he caught himself and added, “Not home, I mean, at school.”

I didn’t mind. I thought about how “home” means the place where you belong, where you feel comfortable, where your things are, but more importantly, where your people are. And “your people” begins with your spouse. For Stephen, “home” is in transition.

I have loved being part of “home” here for all of our kids. I love this house made up of pine boards, put in place by their father’s hands. I have loved all the things this home we built together has been, this wild jumble of comforts and joys, tensions and challenges. I love this place where we sometimes eat birthday cake and other times survive Norovirus. Where we sometimes clink glasses of champagne at midnight and other times share ordinary bowls of pasta while standing in the kitchen. I love this place made up of people we love and am amazed that it all started with just Dan and me, and a little thing God wanted to do. Though I want each of my children to cherish memories of this home, I want them to make their own too.

When we arrived at the airport, Gabby gathered her things and Stephen picked up my phone. “You need to get a podcast going on here for your trip back, so you don’t fall asleep,” he said. 

That kid is always taking care of me. I let him open the podcast app, but knew I wouldn’t want to listen. I would need the quiet ride back to think, to process, and maybe even cry a little after saying goodbye. It felt important to do this feeling, too.

I watched my two big kids walk side by side into the airport. Just as I used to watch them, side by side at swimming lessons, side by side making goofy movies as middle schoolers, side by side when I dropped them off at drivers ed. In many ways, they have also been “home” to one another through these years.

Sometimes change hurts. But so much good, so many blessings, and so many unknown but beautiful things started with a great big change that Dan and I said yes to almost 30 years ago. I love that, though many things have changed, in the most basic of ways, Dan and I have not. We are still here. God is still with us. We are still home to each other, just as we were at the start.

I sat in the car, turned off the podcast, and sent Dan a text before starting the drive back: “Dropped them off, all is well…I’m coming home.”

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In Giving Thanks and Letting Go, Danielle Bean ponders her emptying nest and overflowing heart as she encourages you to join her in leaning on God and discovering the joy and promise of this sacred season of parenting.