Happy #96: Home, peace, and happiness abide wherever you are.

I'm sharing my friend Peggy's recent blog post because while having suffered some of the same losses, I simply could not have said it better.

On the path to peace and happiness, we often forget where the essence of well-being we all desire is most easily found.

Home, peace, and happiness dwell wherever you are. And there are people out there who feel peaceful, happy, and at home when you're around. Which is no small thing...

See all those little thumbnail pictures on the right hand side of this page? Those are people telling me they love me. And that my small efforts to share my heart matters to them. I feel loved by them. Loved. Just the presence of their pictures shows me I am supported--a simple thing making a meaningful difference for me. :-)

You are home for people in ways you may never know.

Just love.

Here's how Peggy said it:

Last year I lost a house, for the fifth time in as many years. The first of these was the house my children mourned losing, the one their father had provided. Beautiful and large, it was the center of where their friends and their lives revolved. I think they mourned the loss of that home at least as much as the departure of their father, who, after choosing his new wife, moved to another house in another state, with another’s children. So nothing felt more urgent to me than providing a real home for my children, whom he had left behind. My resolve and my faith in my ability to achieve this, as their mother, was unwavering. It was my reason for being; finding a home base, where my children would feel safe. I knew they needed to not feel like they were losing everything. And thus the journey toward "home" began.

Year One: a rental, just outside the orbit of familiar people and places, but the only place I could get. Displaced Homemaker, no marketable skills. WalMart job, shattered credit rating. The house was too small. My boys lived in the garage, and would not go to church or school. Faith being central to my survival, I feared my children would lose whatever level of religious faith they had acquired up to that point, so Year Two brought a lease-to-own, closer to their schools and our church. A Good Mother knows the value of the influence of church-going friends and the comfort of being at familiar schools. One year later, I lost the down-payment when I was unable to qualify to purchase the house. Two of my sons had dropped out of high school, and none were attending church. My youngest son had anger and anxiety issues that forced me to withdraw him from public school, and my own educational plans were put on hold. Yet I pressed on in my quest.

Year Three: nanny job with rental house, slightly rural area. More money, but situation with my children deteriorating further, partly due to their father’s unsuccessful attempt to spirit them away. Year Four, nanny job ends, finding us back in our old neighborhood, in a far-too-tiny rental. No credit check required. One side effect of moving a large family out of a large house into increasingly smaller houses is that the amount of stuff that follows, and therefore needs to be managed, seems increasingly larger. By this fourth and smallest house, I felt like a hoarder with all the boxes of STUFF stacked around me. It was memories mixed with junk, and it drained the life out of us all, but I did not have the emotional fortitude to go through it and decide what did and did not matter. Let alone the resolve to throw those things out.

The fifth and final house in this progression would surely be the home that saved my children. Yet another lease-to-own; down-payment forfeited when the deal went south. It turns out, those who require no credit check are often shady themselves, and this was proven to me painfully when I realized how completely I had been ripped off. Alimony running out, most of my children having moved out, and a houseful of stuff which I could not afford to maintain. Two years shy of completing my college degree, and most painful of all, I had failed to make my children a home. They were finding homes of their own. For me, this was Rock Bottom. No money, no job, no home, and no idea why I had failed so miserably. As a mother, as a wife, as a woman. I was in total despair.

I put the stuff in storage, dragged my exhausted self and my youngest son to Utah, and moved into my parents’ home to take refuge. This is where the healing and the epiphany began. The pressure of needing to provide was lifted. My parents made me feel at home. When I returned to Arizona to visit my children, they made me feel at home. I started to see that they still loved me. Unconditionally. They appreciated my efforts to make them a home, and they told me so. I discovered that home is not a location. Once I had let go of the idea that it was the four walls that mattered, I discovered home in many places. In the car, driving cross-country with my youngest son; sleeping on the couch where my three oldest sons, all of whom are gainfully employed and doing just fine, share a home; at my married daughter’s apartment, holding my grandbabies; at church, at a concert, a movie, or enjoying a meal with people that I love. Home is not a structure made of brick and mortar. Home is something you carry with you, that you offer to others. Home is who you’re with, wherever you are, so long as it is built on a foundation of love.

Peggy LaRee Sorenson