I wonder if you can actually feel homesick when you are sitting inside your home. Still, I don't know how to describe my mood better than to call it homesickness. With my dad still in hospital and all kinds of medical appointments, I am starting to really long for that time a few months ago, when I was feeling really me. I was just so full of energy and I think that for the first time in my life I really felt quite happy being me. These days the worries and anxieties have swapped places with happiness and joy and I sometimes wonder where I have disappeared to. It feels like I am on auto-pilot, but the real me has left the building. If you find the real me, kindly send her back to me, I would really like to have her back.
It is not just me that I feel homesick for, I feel homesick for that place on earth where I feel better than anywhere else. The plan was that we would go there this Sunday, but I would be worried sick if I was there and dad was here. Can you be homesick for a place that is not your home in the abstract sense of the word? I remember when I was a little girl, I was incredibly homesick whenever I was on vacation and it was much worse when I was on some kind of school trip. All I wanted was to go home, anywhere else in the world felt very unsafe to me. For years and years I have put off going on vacation. I felt like I was better off staying here, where I knew what to expect. And then in 2010 we went to the Alsace for the first time. It was our first holiday in many, many years. When we got there, a strange thing happened....I felt right at home. I felt more at home there than I was feeling in my actual home. I felt more me. Every time we went back there, I would breathe a sigh of relief when we passed Strassbourg...." I am right where I belong".
The place I belong now is with my family. There is a time and place for everything. Home is where your heart is and my heart is with my dad, my mum and my sister now. It would not feel like a good place to be right at this moment, but I sure miss it. That little area in France where I feel like a better version of myself and where I wish I would never have to leave.....
And then there is the home I drive back to every evening. I find my husband there, patiently putting up with all my anxieties, doing all the stuff in the house that I don't have time for and playing me DVD's with comedies on them to take my mind off things. I also find Kayla there, that little bundle of mischief who never lets a day go by without having made me laugh out loud. Maybe home is not a place at all, maybe it is just the strings attached to your heart going to those you love, your passions and your authentic self. My authentic self might be lost in the woods a bit, when she gets back, I will probably feel less homesick....
The Alsace will wait for me to return and I will once again feel like I am home again



