Every day as my two-year-old and I pull into the driveway, he begins to yell, “bubba…sissy! Bubba! Sissy!” When they are home and hear us pulling in, they will greet him at the car and help him out to hug and play. This has been their routine for the last year or so. As we were pulling into the drive today, he began to call their names as usual, and I just held the moment in my heart for a minute when it occurred to me that when he thinks about home, he thinks about his siblings. Oh, the joy that brings to a mother!
I grew up with a rocky relationship with my parents. It was not ideal for them or me, but what the instability with my parents gifted me was this unusually strong relationship with my siblings – all four of them. In my childhood, my siblings were my confidants, and in my adult life, they continue to be my best friends. We allied ourselves to survive our childhood together and carried that unity for the remainder of our lives. We could have never known how meaningful that would be in the different seasons of life that we would later face, but it has deeply mattered in the thick of tough seasons. It especially mattered when one of those siblings died unexpectedly and we realized that all we had left was time. And that time could be just one more day or it could be a little more. After our older brother passed away, the four of us left behind organically took a step closer toward each other. We began to bond more and more. We share more of the mundane parts of our lives with each other. We send each other jokes and memes when there isn’t anything else to say to just stay… connected.
When I think about the day that my kids leave home and start lives on their own, I pray that the three of them stay tightly connected. I pray that they share the same kind of closeness and quality of friendship as my sisters, brother and I do. I pray that they know if they have nothing else, they have each other.
There’s something about living out the same beginnings under the same roof with the same parents, the same memories, the same life principles and expectations that really unify you in a way that can’t ever be undone or replicated with another person. I know one day my kids will come to understand that as they mature, but in the meantime, I’m going to remind them to absolutely cherish one another in these growing up years because you only get one childhood to live. And I’ll continue to pray that when they think about home, they think about one another before they think about the four walls that hold them.
-by Destini McPherson
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