Miranda Lambert has a song, 'The House That Built Me.' It's a song asking if she could go into her childhood home for a visit, just to be surrounded by the walls and stand on the floors of the place that represents so much of who she is today. For many people it resonates because their lives have been spent making memories in primarily one home. I, on the other hand, moved quite a lot as a child. It was often in the same areas, but I grew up in many houses and many neighborhoods in two different continents.
For me there was no house to hold my memories as a keepsake. It was people who built me; the ones who were with me despite the moves, the ones who have walked with me from childhood until now that have spoken deeply into my heart and mind... those Family members, mentors and friends are the keepers of the memories of who I am and what makes me 'me' and I'm thinking of them especially tonight.
It's been a warm, rainy day here and it feels exactly like Christmas in Zimbabwe (my home land). I've been singing Christmas songs to Charli all day because of it and keep reminding myself I'm seven months off on the timing. Despite the scheduled nature of this area, I keep expecting someone to pop in for tea or the timer to go off signaling that the cut-out and spritz cookies are ready.
Tonight I sat down at my piano and found myself singing song after song that flooded me with memories. They're not memories I rehash often, they're the kind that sit deep in my subconscious until I sing those songs on a day like this and I'm taken back to time when I was younger and those songs were playing at school dances, on the CD I just got, or on the soundtrack to a movie I watched so many times I can still recite whole scenes... and I missed the people the built me something fierce. With it came a desperate desire for those people to know Charli.
Like everyone else, much of who I am is based on my experiences. However, my life has had many unique details in it that are shared experience to only a few others who grew up with me in these same situations. These few others understand a part of me that doesn't show very much now as an adult but it's still very much there and it drives me. It's the things about me that make up my core. Maybe if they can get to know Charli, if she can get to know them, she'll get to understand me in a way that I fear she may never know otherwise. Maybe if she met the people who built me, it'd be a bit like taking her to my hometown. There's something about going to someone's home that explains so much of who they are. I want her to understand those things about me because it will explain many things about her.
In the busyness of life, the juggling of schedules, meeting constant demands, taking opportunities to continue learning and building new friendships, I hope we can carve out enough moments for her to visit all those who make up my home.
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