This Hurts....

I can't figure this out, but more and more, if I vacate my usual life and take a trip somewhere on vacation, I just get utterly depressed to see it come to an end and have the regularity return.  We aren't coming home just yet, but we're ending the Belfast portion of our trip tomorrow....and all day today, I've felt something akin to a clamp around my heart that gets tighter with each passing hour....

And I have to emphatically state that I love the life I've been given--feel so thankful and blessed.  I think getting a glimpse of simplicity--without household responsibilities, scheduled kids' events, making do with only a few clothes in the closet, having more time to just see and hear and feel each other as a family--and then to return home, where it becomes harder to do these things...just feels like a drag. It reminds me of how we were created to be very simply-made people--men and women, in the garden, filled completely with God, enjoying His creation to the full. I feel like vacations give me the tiniest glimpse of that--TINIEST--and only on those trips where I let myself truly rest and recharge.

We are leaving Belfast tomorrow and all I've been able to do for an hour is lie in this bed and gaze out this window to the Belfast Lough and find myself coming up very short of feeling capable of packing.

My kids are downstairs eating a dinner of Marks & Spencer prawns (shrimp) and McVitie's caramel digestive biscuits (cookies) while they watch some version of Ice Age on television and again, I find myself coming up quite short of actually caring.

I think one of the hardest things about leaving is the physical separation I feel approaching with our friends, the Bennetts.  What a rare thing in life to have a friend situation where Dean and I both find ourselves caring very much for both Al and Suzanne and now all our children know and love each other and have laughed and chased and played and just gotten on famously for the past five days....  And now for everyone to have gotten to know each other and tasted the sweetness, but to know it's temporal and tomorrow it will change, inevitably, and we will be apart again--most likely for a long time....  Ouch.  The heart clamp tightens.

I've actually had to remind myself that our life is in Knoxville--that God has very specifically placed us there.  That even if we up and moved here, which we won't, it would be the same here, eventually--household responsibilities, children getting on each other's nerves, children getting on my nerves, children involved in activities that need to be constantly reigned in and re-evaluated, marital scuffs, stresses at work, etc.  All the hateful little thorns that seek to prick and entangle.  Moving here = not an option = looking for a way to release the clamp and coming up empty-handed....

I just heard the boys talking in their room over an hour after they went to bed and I went in all stern-ish, "I shouldn't be hearing any talking in here at all!"  And Walker says, "We're just talking about our sadness."  I asked, "Sadness about leaving?"  He said, "Yeah.  Are we ever gonna see our friends again??"  ((gulp)) "Of course you will...."  And then, "When?  Like in 10 years??"  Arghhhh, why oh why are there oceans between friends?  Why are air fares so expensive?  Why is this freaking clamp on my heart about to cut off my blood supply??

((exhaling))  ((tears))  ((exhaling))  ((tears))