Going To See About A Girl

I swore I’d never come home. I spun this desert dust under my tires, threw a middle finger out the window, and left her in my rearview mirror so many times. I crossed state lines and my own boundary lines and drew lines in the sand until my fingers bled. I declared that parched chapter closed and a new adventure on the horizon. I made other plans. So many other plans. And each time I’d return. Resentful. Wincing at every single one of her sharp edges and barren spaces. Plotting my next escape. Until we had to leave Thailand. Until we had nowhere else to go but to come back to the States. Nowhere else to return to but Arizona. Nowhere else to rest and to heal but home.

Only then was I ready to make peace with the desert.

Only then could I begin to come home to myself.

HOME is swirling so strong right now. And I know exactly why. I know it’s the wild pacing the perimeter of Carsyn leaving for college, a milestone I am rooted into with every load of laundry and Target-run, every show we binge and every evening chat we stay up late to finish. I am so conscious of how every step of parenting is a reparenting of ourselves and I keep feeling surprised that the closer she gets to leaving home, the more at home in myself I become. The more ready she is, the more ready I am. I’ve said it before, she’s been raising me toward this her entire life.

And now here we are.

Less like a pin on a map.

More like topography beneath our skin.

The ground in ourselves we’ve fought to reclaim. The inner territory we wander. The terraforming we have witnessed under our own feet. Home isn’t just a place we leave and come back to. Home is coursing through our veins and we take it everywhere we go. Our bodies are guests on land that was never ours. When we are home in ourselves, home is always ours.

Kaitlin Curtice shared a poem this week in her Substack for International Day of the World’s Indigenous People called Finding Home Is A Revolutionary Act and invited us all in to write alongside her. I’m still not over her line,

“Finding home is revolution, and the journeying back and forth, the searching, the tending to the smaller parts of us the long and hope and heal is everything upon everything.” (Kaitlin Curtice)

My soul sister Mel’s book In the House of Me is part of the stack of books I gave to Carsyn when she graduated from high school a few months ago and it’s in the growing pile of thing to take to her dorm. Mel’s wisdom on consent and being home in ourselves has grafted it’s way into my bones and I hope it will finditss way in to my girl’s bones at some point too.

My partner in crime bestie Allison just returned home after an internship with the Department of Justice in D.C. where she spent the summer before her final year of law school making herself at home in D.C. and making her younger self so damn proud. She is all of us returning to ourselves to find our wildest dreams still have a pulse and are daring us to bet on ourselves.

Sarah was here for a visit recently, to this desert she has called home just the same, and we squeezed in some hours over sangria and snacks that were supposed to be spent working on SLOW BURN but ended up being a breathless whirlwind of sharing about our grandmothers and the parts of us that come from parts of them. We pitched our next wild ideas to each other and shared dreams of future projects and manuscript proposals and sat in awe of the synchronicity between us. By now we’ve learned home isn’t just where we come from - this desert expanse that runs through both our veins. Home isn’t just where we are living - Arizona or Illinois. Home is in us. Home IS us.

And now it’s time for my girl to fly. Fly honey, fly. For the first time on her own. For the first time of her own choosing. For the first time under her own authority. She already knows she is home. Everything she needs is already inside of her. It’s high stakes, but it’s also not so high stakes. It’s about college, but it’s also not at all about college. That thing she always wanted to do. She’s about to go do it. She’s about to make herself so damn proud.

She’s going to see about a girl - HERSELF - and every one of us knows, that is an entire revolution.