Thursday, December 3, 2009

Feeling Lost and Unable to Find My Way Home

I am 32 years old. I spent the first 15 years of my life in a small, rural Massachusetts town. Then, after my mother and stepfather divorced, we moved to a small town in rural Florida. We stayed there for a year and a half and then moved to a small, rural town in southern Georgia. In 1998, after five years, I moved back to that small town in Florida with my daughter who was two at the time. Years later, we moved from the rural towns to the bigger "cities" of Gainesville and Ocala and then eventually back to that small town when I got divorced. In 2006, we moved to Massachusetts but after a difficult time, I moved back to Florida in November of 2008. My daughter will be 14 in February and she has relocated seven times.

I have asked myself so many times what spurs me to pack our belongings and move and the answer is simply: I do not know where I belong.

I have never "put down roots" even when I owned a house with my second husband. I have never landed in one spot, city or town that truly felt like home.

I don't know if it is because I moved at a time when I had my life planned out - how the last years of high school would be, where I was going to college, who my roommate would be. Instead of those plans, I became the weird, awkward girl with no Southern accent surrounded by people who didn't know my story. I didn't fit and I have spent my life since then feeling like I didn't fit.

Sometimes I feel as if I don't fit even surrounded by people who love me and have known me my whole life.

I know there is a plan for my life but I can't help but wonder if feeling as if I don't fit and not having a home is part of that plan. To what end are these feelings? Then I remind myself that I don't need to know all the answers. Someone else, someone bigger and better than me, knows the answers and I just have to trust that He knows what he is doing.

No comments: