How do you know you are loved?
You can raise your voice and storm out into the bitter cold and have him kissing your forehead twenty minutes later. I burrowed my head in the crease between his shoulder and neck as his arms threaded through mine.
“I’m sorry I reacted the way I did. Now come back in here and share a glass of eggnog. It’s soy.”
The worded emotions were spinning around my head in scratched record form to fast for me to make a sentence out of them. “This very well could be the psychological form of cancer,” I told him as he gave my shoulders another tight squeeze.
We grew up as Globetrotting Nomad’s. Resenting time because it’s a working holiday the boss man imposes. Growing up as a child of the 80’s my family fit together like a mismatched pair of Chuck Converse sneakers. The five of us kids are different and exactly alike in many ways. Only now, they are my best friends. At ten years old I would question, after being banished to my room for the evening, why I had been sent to THIS family. A mother who is trying to keep up with the Jones’s, the fantasized Norman Rockwell painted family. A father who worked his humor around the office to counter balance stress sixty hours a week. Like father like daughter. Houston we have a problem. I wanted to be just like him, I’m exactly like him.
Family members tend to have a good fight every third year or 17th family gathering. The issues have compartmentalized in the teenage strife you long to forget and wrinkled clothes that won’t iron out. We fight serving hurt feelings for dinner and makeup hugs as a night cap. It’s those small complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make your personal alarm clock go off and you realize the hard times make you feel alive and grow. I think that’s real. Ridiculously real. Families who state they never fight are missing out on Maury Povich moments where it’s appropriate to break down and you hear wise words from siblings and parents. Let’s face it, if you can’t tell those that love you and vice versa what you really think then your love may be as ill contrived as a Seattle tan.
Families are music, dancing, misunderstood phrases, kissing, raised voices, laughing, La Vie Bohem playing and leaning close as “Hey mister, she’s my sister” booms from the speakers, singing in church, fondue, fireplaces, joking, tears, inside jokes, real empathy, and love – there’s always plenty of that.
I drove home Monday in 70 degree weather with the windows down and the sunroof open allowing humidity of welcome home sentiment to embrace my skin. Houston’s skyline loomed in the distance, the Enron building mirroring the city in steel reflection and the electric blue lights of the Ferris wheel cajoling.
The moment it hits is unstoppable. My chest tightened, I swallowed hard nearly choking on my tongue squeezing my eyes to fight back a tear. I was already missing them.
