The Gift of Being Known

 

“Where are you headed?” the man beside me asked, as the Atlantic sat beneath us. We had paused our movies to take a moment for peanuts and soda. 

“North Carolina. My home,” I said. 

“Visiting some family?” he inquired.

“No, actually. I’m returning home.”

 My hometown was the destination but my heart felt pulled other places as if it was a compass and my true north was elsewhere. After leaving seven years prior for college and then moving five times in the following three years I was returning to the land of dogwoods and cardinals and honeysuckles. In all the moves I had grown accustom to the uncustomary, familiar with the unfamiliar, and now as I returned to the place of my childhood I wondered if this too would be like a foreign place to me or would I quickly realize this place was, and always would be, my home.

When I first moved back to my home state of North Carolina it was unexpected. It wasn’t necessarily part of the plan. I had thought once I graduated from the mountains of this state I would be off and away, only to return for holidays and family gatherings. Only after an ill-suited job and a far too low bank account did I realize I needed to come back home and sort some things out. Would this be long term? I wasn’t sure. But the whip lash of the last three years of new people, places, and experiences left me unknowingly desperate for steady and doubtless nothing was steadier than my grandparent’s home and a job at my former middle and high school.

 

It was comical really. Not only did I return home but I also felt as if I stepped back in time ten years. I was living in the room my dad grew up and walking the school hallways I walked as thirteen year old, only this time I was Ms. Morgan and not Savannah. I spent time in the teacher’s lounge with my former English teacher and frequented the spots my high school friends and I used to go to. It was unsettling in a way, but also comforting. Like I was being mothered by this place and at times I wanted freedom but in the deepest part of me I knew the hurts I carried that felt too big to give to the places that didn’t know me could be held by this place that did. 

I was resistant to this place because the person I had become was different than the person I was when I left this place. This hometown was the place that sent me out into the world and received me back on fall breaks during college, Christmas visits, and family gatherings. The initial sending was a girl with eyes wide and a heart hopeful, but the college years had left me bruised and battered and embittered. The year after college, as I froze in what had to be the tundra (or North Dakota) I fell in love too quickly and got engaged in the same manner. The ending was painful and embarrassing and I needed an escape plan. So I moved to the U.K. and then Tennessee, both bringing healing and mending from people that felt safe. They weren’t this place of home but they were home. They accepted me without knowing all of me and they loved me and let me love them. I felt like a new person and never wanted to return to the imbittered person I was. 

 

But then, I moved. Perhaps too soon? Could I not stay in Tennessee? Let her be my new mother? Let her continue the work she was doing? Not I the nomad. I was off needing another adrenaline rush and passport stamp. Off to German lands ready to meet new people. Perhaps I flew the nest too soon. Icarus wanting even more and more. This is was led me to the miserable and broke staten that brought me to my original state of North Carolina. This is what led me home. 

And in coming home I was not the same. The place didn’t fit as she once did. I was bumbling, falling into the patterns I had in my childhood and also learning some new patterns had formed that didn’t mesh well with the place of my childhood. 

 

Still she was kind. This place and these people were kind. In my temper tantrums and angsty times she loved me. She let me putter around the house irritated because she knew me. She knew I could be upset and that wasn’t everything about me. This was a luxury I hadn’t had in the previous places in which I had to be on my best behavior because the people didn’t know me, didn’t trust me. If I got irritated their frame of reference for me was limited and that moment of irritation took up a larger portion of their time with me. But with her, it was just a season. Just a moment in our relationship to be forgiven and perhaps laughed about in the future.

    Though she loved me I felt uncertain about her. In my insecurity I didn’t want to claim her. I had been the nomad, the forever wanderer, and now I had returned and it felt more like giving up than coming home. As I met new people and they asked where I was from my reply of “Here” felt shameful. I found not so subtle ways to slip in the name of cities I had lived proving to them, but mostly to myself, that I was not someone who stuck around their hometown. Fine for other people, but not for me. I was the adventurer. But soon my not so subtle attempts to justify myself became annoying, even to me, and I relented. 

     

I needed to relent because though this place was kind she was also disciplining me. I had fluttered around so much never settling that when I finally did there was a lot of maturing to do. And a lot of resistance on my part. But this familiar place and the familiar faces remained as I unwillingly put roots down. The community came and I finally planted my feet down after kicking them about for far too long.

    Soon the familiarity itself became a wonder. To know this place so well and to feel so connected to it. To have so much history in one place, so many memories etched into the diner joints and grocery stores and parks like initials in a tree: N.C. and S.M. North Carolina and Savannah Morgan. She was a part of me and I her. 

    Some people need the going. They need to leave and not return. But some people, like me, need the returning. They need the mother of their childhood and they need the love only she can bring. My home is here, and it is still in other places I’ve lived and loved, but mostly she is here. She is the one who knows me and who I proudly call home.