Home, Sweet Home – Part 2

If you subscribe to my blog, you may remember (huge stretch, given my own personal memory!) that last week I started a series, Home, Sweet Home, and I left off saying that I recently knocked on the door of Chris’s childhood home. 

It will take another entire series to unravel what I was doing at Chris’s childhood home, but it led to Chris eventually walking into the home where he lived from the age of 5 until he was 18. 

Miranda Lambert has a song called The House that Built Me. As Chris walked in and was greeted by a rush of memories, I wondered why we aren’t more intentional to visit our childhood homes. You may laugh and think the answer is obvious. Rest assured, I’m not under any pretense that there aren’t painful memories among the pleasant ones. I haven’t met a perfect family yet, but there are so many things that we bury that, with some years and perspective, returning to that very place could potentially help us discover some of the underlying disconnects to our current realities.

Chris and I are firm believers in being proactive in pursuing health. Our trip into that home brought back memories Chris had forgotten. He had forgotten that as a 10 year old, shortly after his brother died, he moved into his brother’s room and had his mom move a new trophy case into the room right next to his brother’s. Looking back as a 50 year old, you’d better believe that memory resurfacing validated some of the emotions that Chris had previously worked through in his journey to overcome both the loss of his brother and a significant father wound. The experience also opened doors to have conversations with his mom and sister that helped bring connection and healing to everyone. 

It requires someone to be healthy… but if that’s established, I just wonder what conversations of healing could happen among our adult siblings or with parents if we were able to visit our childhood homes.

I’d love your thoughts…