Belonging

How many people do we belong to in our life? How many times do our hearts open- close- then re-open themselves to an old love? Start a fresh journey with a new love? The thing that intrigues me the most… is I loved them all the same, yet so different. I love my mom entirely, with all of my being, and I belong to her.  My dad and I fought the battle every day to get to the place where we are now, and I belong to him, yet, I belong to my mom? My heart feels completely full when I think of either one of them, but when I think of my Jesus, my sister, him, and even the hims before him, it feels the same way. I belong, or did belong to all those people.

I have asked myself so many times, can we really love more than one person, soul mate kind of love, in our lifetime? For the longest time, usually to comfort myself through a break up, I would tell myself no, that there is only one true love, and the rest was practice...but how can that be? It’s not, I can’t believe that. I have been lucky enough, more blessed then I can ever comprehend, to have gone through my life thus far with an amazing collection of best friends. Most I am still friends with, some I am not…and whether we don’t talk anymore because we out grew each other, or because we made the conscious decision to go our separate ways, for the season(s) they were in my life, I belonged to them.

We are not supposed to have regrets, and for the most part I don’t. I subscribe to the ideal that God has a plan for me, and my sinful nature guided me off that path more times than I’d like to remember, but God always met me where I was at, and readjusted things from there. I have fought a bloody war, and I am grateful that there haven't been more casualties. I am not okay with losing one friend, let alone the number of friends I have, but what upsets me more than coming across old pictures or an inside joke now and then, is the little piece of my heart they took with them…the loss that comes with no longer belonging. Where this is all going, if it is going anywhere at all, is that the loss of those friends seems lonely, but I love the friends I have now so much I don’ know where I would find any room to love more.

I look in his eyes and I know. I just know. It doesn’t take away from the fact that I knew then too. There were a few I didn’t love, even if I thought I did, but there were some I did, and for the short time I was in their lives, I belonged to them…..

My dad told me something a few weeks ago that hasn’t left my mind since…. We had an honest discussion, well; I had an honest listen, to him talking to me about the divorce. It’s a touchy subject, as it should be, and we haven’t had much dialogue about the topic since it happened. I have struggled since the day the decision was made to end things, with an overwhelming amount of emotion, most of which has been guilt for putting my family through such heartache. Being responsible for hurting someone(s) you love, someone(s) you still belong to, is the hardest thing I have gone through. I can deal with anger, I almost wish for it to make things easier, because to love someone, still, but know you have to make a decision that is best for you, that will hurt them, there aren’t enough tears to cry. The second my dad brought the guilt up, and how I need to release it…give it to the God I thank for forgiveness and grace every day, I began to cry. This is my dad, the dad I belonged to until I married someone and belonged to them for a short while, only to end things resulting in me not really belonging to anyone (except my mom, Jesus, my sister, my friends- get it?) … and he’s telling me to forgive myself….then he says, “it’s okay Megan, you think with your heart not with your head, you always have. It’s who you are.”

It’s who I am.

The thing is my heart doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to my mother, my father, my sister, my Jesus, my best friends, and him….. The greatest commandment of all is to love like Jesus loved. We have become a people that view putting others before ourselves as a weakness. It’s me...me...me...” I’ll love you as much as I can but only if it isn’t at a sacrifice to me...” Ugh. There is a lot of back and forth I don’t get involved with, I don’t do soap box, I don’t do debates, but this is one thing I am adamant about. True joy, pure and true joy in its most natural form, comes from loving others, doing for others, giving to others. My heart hasn’t belonged to me since I was old enough to use it, and the problem (for me) does not come with figuring out how to grow up and take back my heart, to think for myself and only myself, but to find a balance between thinking with the heart I have left, that belongs to who it belongs to now, and not letting the pieces of my heart that were given away to those I used to belong, to damage me. Make me a cynic. Lonely.

I have loved more than I have done anything else, and I have not always done it perfectly but Lord knows I tried. I don’t just love a little, I don’t even know how- I give it all, everything, every part of me to belong to every part of you. I guess what I am wondering, what I still haven’t quite figure out, is how I can love so entirely the people I belong to now, when there is still so much of me belonging to those that aren’t here loving me anymore. What a humbling position to even be in.

Home for the Holidays

There’s this couple that live in the corner house on my block. The first time I saw them was a couple of weeks before Halloween. They were outside together putting up their decorations, which sadly, blew away the next day.  Thanksgiving rolls around, and there they are, dressing up a scarecrow and sticking fall flowers in their flower pots.  Two days before Thanksgiving I had my house completely decked out. I thought I was the first person to have my Christmas decorations up before Thanksgiving had its turn, but the couple on the corner had their colored lights on Thanksgiving night.  It is my first time decorating my own home, and besides a wreath my mother made me and an ornament I got for Christmas a couple of years ago, I had nothing. My best friend and I spent a day, and a lot of money, roaming the aisles of every convenience store in my area. After losing our mind, okay, after I lost my mind in one store, we had to caravan our carts across the parking lot. There are few times, especially with the stress of life in the past couple of months, that I get to just laugh. Laugh like when I was a kid and would spin in circles until I was dizzy with my sister in the backyard, but this was one of those moments. Every time I walk by that tree I think of Carolyn and me trying to hold onto these carts with the wind blowing us all over the place. Those are the memories Christmas is made of, and thank God we allow ourselves to take a step back from diets, bills, rush-hour traffic, and chores to enjoy life, even if only for the few short weeks of the holiday season. I don’t know when we became a society that is in such a hurry we need the excuse of a holiday to justify not taking life so seriously, but I am glad we at least have that much. I walk by my tree every morning, a little disappointed I am so busy with finals and working to have time to sit on my couch and enjoy the twinkle lights and the candles burning….

That’s why I like this couple so much. I like to make up stories about people I see a lot but don’t know, and I have decided this young couple is living in their first home, enjoying their first set of holidays as co-inhabitants of a home they will look back on one day and say, “remember when we spent all that money on those Halloween decorations and they blew away the next day?” ..Or, “remember how small that house was and how we would bump into each other even standing in the kitchen together?” Thank God for small houses and the love that overflows them. I grew up in a small home, my sister and I shared a room, and there was one bathroom to the four of us. I was the happiest girl in the world when we moved into the big house my senior year, I got my own room!! However, I wouldn’t trade the years laughing in bed with my sister or doing my make up in the bathroom with my mom for anything in this world.

I was getting my usual holiday, red toes, pedicure yesterday, enjoying my coffee and listening to everyone talk about their holiday plans and what they were buying whom. There was an older guy next to me, and his granddaughter was on the other side of him. He was one of those happy- all- the –time people, you know? He was smiling and greeting every customer and worker that walked by his chair. When his pedicure was finished, the nail tech asked him how he felt. He said he felt wonderful and that he mostly came because he wanted to create a memory with his granddaughter, one that they “could look back on later and laugh at”, then he said, “This is a good memory.” I cried, instantly. I would give anything in this world to have my grandfather here to get a pedicure with, purely just to create a memory we could laugh at later. Thank God for family members to make memories with, maybe those family members have left us sooner than we would have liked, maybe time and anger have combined to create a rift so huge it appears irreparable right now, but thank God there are some, for all of us, that we can look back on and say, “that was a good memory.”

These are the things that tie us all together. These are the memories, and the day to day activities, that put the same smile on my face as the girl behind me in line at Starbucks has on her face during this time of year.  She probably didn’t just spend an afternoon scouting Target aisles, caravanning four carts full of ornaments and lighted garland, but something has happened in her days leading up to the holidays that has made her smile. The couple on the corner, in a small house in the middle of Adelanto, the man at the pedicure shop, excited to spend 13 dollars to sit with his granddaughter for forty minutes, just the two of them, Carolyn and I trying to balance wrapping paper rolls in an already full cart, they’re all special, and rare, moments to the people experiencing them.

It might not be much, but its home. Home for the holidays, at least for now, if not the rest of the year, its home.