What happens when you go back home again.....

      I grew up in a small town, next door to my grandparents, who owned a store. My grandparents are kind of small town celebrities, and my mom joins that rank too, even though she moved a little further away. Small town life, while it is peaceful ( most of the time), often times means word travels fast.  People get divorced around here, and the whole town knows in a week. You get arrested, good luck making it twelve hours before someone knows. My teenage years, everyone always liked to threaten they would tell my mom or my grandparents, if I got even a hair out of line.

    Now as an adult, or an adultish, person, moving back to that small little town, brings mixed emotions. Sometimes a serious of events happens, and I question my choice. I choose to move here, we needed help, but there is a whole level of being in a place I swore I wouldn't come back to.

    They used to say it wouldn't be the same if you left and came back. I always wondered, why would you come back to nowhere america, and for a place that never seems to change what would be different. I know from my experience the answer to both.

    I came back because I got roots, this is where my family is, this is where help is. Having special needs kids, even on the mild scale, or not so mild depending on your view point, makes even the simplest thing complicated. As a family we went through, and are still going through more then what most parents get a taste of. I love my kids, I fight as hard as I love, and that's how we keep moving forward.

    What changes when you come back, is you. Small town life, might be smaller, but it's still the same. You can't escape the people who know you. The old baggage, comes back again. I wasn't popular, I actually didn't even really hang out with people here very much, in my teenage years if you wanted to find me, I was in our arch rival territory. I was a traitor, which was really funny being called that considering from my point of view, I didn't have much impact on anyone here ( minus a few people, I would say I had a handful of friends).

    So here I am, with roots, instead of wings. I am back to a place I swore I wouldn't come back to. For a while it was okay, but I got one kid who wants to move back to where we were. One kid who I doubt would leave here. One kid, who I don't think he knows where he would rather be. I got a husband with a good job, and I can't guarantee if we went back he would get as good as a job as he has now. Here I am with roots.

  So why do I stay? Being an adult is most often times doing the things we don't want to do. I need the help, the kids need a village. For them, for that reason we stay.

    I hold hopes though that later on down the road, I can get my wings. When the roots that hold me here aren't so strong, it will be time to go.

    You really can't go back again, because you aren't the same person as you were when you left. You grow as a person. You carry baggage, you carry life lessons. You have grown up, but that town, that town no longer feels like home.

   Roots aren't always a bad thing, just in my case, I hope for wings to fly to a place I have learned holds my heart, and my middle child's heart. Home isn't always where you grew up, sometimes it's the place that you wish you could grow old in.