On Longing for Home and Eating Chocolate Instead of Screaming at Someone
After making such a big hooha about roadtrip coffee in this blog post, it seems fraudulent not to tell you about the drive back home. Right off the bat I can tell you we did not stop for coffee.
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In true parental diligence, we spend our morning exhausting the boys. We perfectly time our forty five minute drive home to align with naptime, a risky move with our car-hating napper, this is not the time for whimsical musings about coffee on the road. This is life or death. Or rather, 45 minutes of snoring vs 45 minutes of screaming.
By the time the North Coast sea is a faint slither of navy in our rearview mirror, the baby is asleep. And after months of anxiety ridden car journeys, everyone agrees the silence tastes better than coffee.
My own head is beginning to bob into a slumber when the car comes to a slamming halt and I’m jolted awake by Paddy’s exasperated what the?
The road through the next village is closed. And there’s no signs for an organised diversion. Classic Northern Ireland. Classic country people, we hiss. We do a U-turn and wait for google maps to re-route. The estimated arrival time increases by 20 minutes. I nervously eat a Milky Way chocolate bar.
I’ll spare you the details, but this new route brings us to a different closed village and the same closed road. We do another U-turn, head back to where we started and rummage around in google maps for a way to get around this dang village instead of through it.
I immediately think of the Israelites fleeing Egypt and instead of taking them the shortest route through Philistine territory, God takes them in a roundabout way through the wilderness towards the red sea. But to be honest with you, that’s as far as my spiritual thought goes. I’m far too busy cursing farmers, worshiping my baby’s nap and eating another Milky Way so my mouth is too full to scream at someone.
Our journey time increases by another 20 minutes.
We exchange some snappy comments and choose a detour that goes as far away from this forsaken village as possible.
Estimated arrival time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
The baby wakes up like clockwork.
We should have been home by now.
I didn’t want to leave our sweet holiday behind. Well, mostly I didn’t want Paddy to go back to work and I didn’t want to go back to my version of work, or return to wrangling kids by myself all day and have to share my showers again.
But when we eventually walk through our front door, two and half hours after first setting off, feeling a little fuzzy around the edges; I experience the relief of coming home. Maybe for the first time ever. I’ve lived in this house for years but I’ve never been away from it for longer than a few days and honestly, I take these walls for granted.
After releasing the boys into the wild of forgotten toys and longed-for lego, the first thing I do is check my herbs in the kitchen. They aren’t dead. They have survived my mediocre watering skills and now total abandonment–absolute troopers.
Next, I graze our battered velvet sofa and wipe the dust on our photo frames with my index finger.
I gallop up the stairs to snuggle into our bed, and as much as I loved bed hopping these last couple of weeks, this one fits my body just right.
I poke my head in through the doors of the boys’ bedrooms, weirdly happy to be reunited with all the crap/stuff that couldn’t come on our travels. Bears and baskets of books and night lights shaped like dogs and the worst breastfeeding chair of all time and blankets knitted by Nanny and bath toys that never seem to stay in the bath.
For once, I don’t notice the peeling wallpaper and cupboard door hanging off its hinge and the broken dishwasher and mismatching charity shop furniture and battered blinds.
After all of the detours, I’m just glad to be home.
I’m still cursing Northern Ireland’s lack of event organisation, but I realise I take my forever home for granted too. I can’t help but think God knows what he’s doing when he puts a road block on my well formulated plans in life. Sometimes I joke that my unplanned pregnancy at eighteen set the tone for the rest of adulthood. Nothing has gone to plan ever since.
When everything goes as expected and hoped for, I like to think I give God the appropriate praise. But I know myself too well and I also know my default is to cruise along without giving him a second thought. Every time I have to reroute, I come back to him. And he’s very gracious when I return in a mood, rummaging for answers and direction and eating my body weight in milky ways. I don’t mean to drift from him in the first place, but I guess I forget my need for him.
The detours of life force me to cling to Jesus and nudge me to trust him. They knock me out of my comfort zone and jolt me out of a spiritual slumber. Detours make me long for him, and when the road is especially bumpy, they make me long for home.
To me they are detours, but to God they are simply the road home.