Things first started to feel different when one of the neighbors had her first child. This was the first baby I really spent time with and this was when where I finally came to understand something important about my mother. She is that person at a wedding or family event that always finds a baby and has one on her hip. In this little one’s grip, bright eyes, and cooing sounds I felt that magic. I remember sitting on a couch and having this baby be put in my arms. She was so warm, so fragile, and so beautiful. As I stood up holding her, there was a weightlessness, a feeling that in my arms I had an enormous responsibility, I was holding everything.
Babies are possibility, hope, beauty, and the most wonderful kind of mystery. Holding a baby is what taught me that true strength in life is how we support others, stable, solid, gentle, caring and strong all at the same time. I believe that if we can hold each other up like we hold babies, much of the world’s problems would disappear.
I have a feeling my mom feels the same way.
This was the house where Diana got to know parents and feel connected to my family. They welcomed Buffy into this house. It may seem odd to have brought Buffy along with us to this house for the past decade, on almost forty plane flights, but it makes perfect sense when you know how loved and cherished her presence was in this house by my parents.
This house was the place where I met my nieces for the first time. And this house was place where my children, surrounded by love, incredible food, and family, developed love for my parents, which has had a profound effect on them in their journey of learning to love themselves.
As the years past, more memories of my children and my nieces' running footsteps and squeals of delight filled the space inside of myself that I held this house. My parents insisted that this was a place of play for their grandchildren, so they filled the house with toys in almost every room: a drawer in the kitchen, a section of the buffet, and well, half of the living room.
My parents worked hard, constantly to make this a place where their grandchildren could be children, and could have the space to explore the world, and feel what it meant to be a family.
They were successful.
Before I knew it, the time we spent in this new house eclipse the time we spent it what was my childhood home. The twenty years in this new house, versus the eleven years in our previous home. The years have filled this place in my heart, and given it shape. It’s a shape that’s hard to describe, but impossible not to feel. It’s the shape of gratitude, of something gained, and of something unforgettable
Our last night in this house, I held Ollie as I said goodnight. Close to tears, I told him that I was sad that we were no longer going to visit this house. Ollie replied, “I’m sad too daddy, and sad is okay.”
We talked about what we liked about this house, and what we would miss. I reminded him that this place was wonderful because of his grandparents and the new place would be just as great. I also assured him that my childhood toys, my parents kept, would also be in the new home we would visit.
I held him in silence, feeling in concert all that we were going to miss. Ollie has made me feel better with his laughter and smiles his whole life, but this was the first time his sadness an empathetic reflection of my emotions made me feel less alone and validated about all that I was feeling.
The next morning in the rush to get ready to leave for the airport, I made sure to find a moment, as Ollie suggested the night before to help him write a note to the house to say goodbye.
I am proud of my parents. Through sheer will, hard work and determination that created places I could call homes. In doing so, they taught me make homes out of the places in my life spending energy on the place itself, but more importantly on making the people inside feel seen, valued, and loved for everything that they are and everything that they will become.
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