a work colleague was asking me about my holiday plans for the summer, and i mentioned i was going to be going back to the states for a visit at the end of august, after being away for nearly two years.

“awww. will you mum fuss over you?”, she asked.

and i had to explain that my family isn’t really the fussing type. we’re emotional, but not effusive. our bonds are strong, but silent.

and it’s not that they don’t miss me, and i them. it’s just that they’re *used* to missing me. since seventeen, i’ve been the far-flung daughter, the sister in absentia. i’ve now lived away for nearly as long as i ever lived at home.

i suppose that’s rather remarkable, considering that the rest of my siblings and parents have all stayed within shooting distance of where the family grew up. in fact, my brother now owns the same house we spent our whole childhood in. the same backyard where we skated on our homemade ice rink, learned to throw a baseball, slept in our clubhouse. the same cellar where we once made woodworking projects, kept the old ice cream crank, hid from a tornado and watched the mickey mouse club on a 12 inch black-and-white television. my sister lives on cape cod – where we spent easters searching for coloured eggs at our cousin’s house, and summers getting burned at the beach. both my parents live on the bay – the same bay where we took swimming lessons on days when there were no jellyfish, the same shore we launched our canoes and sailboats from.

but those same places that hold the best pieces of my childhood, also hold the shards of the fallout from my family’s breakup – a dramatic shattering that none of us ever really, ever truly got over. being home, seeing those places stirs my heart up into a mixed muddle of mourning and yearning in equal parts. i’ve not yet been home once to visit without at some point ending up in tears, wanting only to flee. so is my physical distance an act of rebellion against memory? protection from the barbs of heartache and deliberate inurement to grief? just part of my innate wanderlust and fear of committment?

probably some, if not all of these things. maybe most, and something more.

i understand the ties of family – having struggled within them and against them for most of my life, i know the test of a family’s strength. it is, after all, our experience that holds us together, the fires which forge. it is both comfort and constraint, depending on one’s current perspective.

i have a feeling that the rest of my family takes comfort in the nearness, the familiarity of a landscape that remains constant in the face of changing lives. and for me, it’s always been a painful reminder of what once was and no longer is – a place where we were all happy for a time, until everything blew up in our faces, leaving gaping wounds. the place where scars are borne.

for me, the comfort of returning home comes in the unspoken understanding we share which makes the memories bearable. the knowing embrace of coming home to people who have been there too, who were there with me, and who stay there, struggling on and staying together.

always there, always together. waiting with open arms, no matter how far i go.

ryan adams – everybody knows

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