The aroma of home...

I made chili today.  I make it the good way...I let it simmer all day in the crock pot.  Slowly the entire house smells like my chili.  It was cold and rainy outside but inside it was the perfect toasty warm.  It it one of those nights when you want to cuddle up in your favorite sweats under a blanket and just enjoy whatever is going on around you.  It is times like this when I can feel so so so far away from home.  Nights like this are what make up a Pennsylvania winter.  What I am trying to say (without feeling the shame and disgust that rush toward me) is that I miss my mother.  I know that I don't miss being mistreated...I miss the mother that she should have been.  It is the smells of fall, winter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas that are reminders of what was lost...they echo in the void in my heart of what will never be fulfilled.  My mother will never be my mother.  She will never welcome me home.  I feel much like an exile here in Georgia.  My heart aches to be able to look forward to going home...if even to celebrate holidays.  I ache to just have a home there to go...like I am a "home" to my children.  I am someone who will praise your scribbles, or your buttoning up your pajama shirt...I am a good mom in the ways that matter.  My failings will never overshadow my victory and my love for my children.  I will never regret cutting my mother out in order to become who I am today and who I will be years from now.  Cutting her out was necessary and it was not a mistake.  I mourn what should have been.  I love my husband and my children and wherever I go I want them with me and where they go I want to be...but why do I feel a gaping need to have our home somewhere else.  I want to go home.  I find myself with teary eyes often this season...more so than the seasons past...homesick just doesn't seem to cover the pain that I feel.  I want what was taken.  I thought the longer I stayed on my journey to healing the less and less I would feel this way come the holidays and the cooler weather.  Yet every year the longing and the pain are deeper and deeper.  I catch myself saying to my husband, "I want to go home." too many times.  I try to keep it to myself so I don't make him feel that he hasn't already given me whatever I need because he sure has.  I guess those times I lament to him are when the pain just becomes too much and it spills out.  God, I want to go home.  I feel empty now.  I try to be content, you know I do!!  I still feel empty.