Just A Wayfaring Sojourner, Blooming On The Go

This week was a deep dive into the contrasts between chaos and consistency. In the past eight nights, I’ve slept in three different beds, cooked and cleaned under three different roofs, scrambled to keep up with life, writing, and motherhood—and did it all strapped to the hilt with duffel bags and backpacks.

I was beginning to feel like a nomad, armed with my semi-minimal packing list, my stash of refillable airless pump bottles for travel, and the veritable pharmacy of over-the-counter medications tidily stored in my perfectly portable pill organizer. Which is handy, because pretty much everything that happened this week was fueled by fever dreams and snot-clotted Kleenex.

My daughters and I are housesitting again, and because our lives are apparently not quite challenging enough, we caught covid. All of us. Because of course we did.

And yet…there’s a quiet sense of magic in all of it. Always being on the go does feel less stable sometimes, but it also creates opportunities for me as a mom, teaching kids about home. I get to show my daughters what it means to build stability in temporary spaces. We might be living out of duffel bags almost as often as we're living in our own space, but we're also blessed to be in a season stuffed with adventure—and the only thing it's cost us is the need to remember that home isn't a place, it's a feeling.

In our usual home routines, my children and I pass each other in the hall like ships in the night. One coming, another going, all at different times. As busy as my family stays, we've had to learn the value of intentional living in chaos, and the detailed planner in me has struggled mightily with embracing imperfection in motherhood. But maybe that's part of why this week, as we fell one by one into a pit of covered coughs and scratchy throats, we chose to treat our symptoms with a surprisingly effective but rarely recognized medication: gratitude.

The week should have been peaceful. A three-day weekend, three solid days at home, and for once, no doctor's appointments on the calendar. Time for rest. Reflection. Self-Care. Moments of connection with my children, quietly divided between deep-cleaning our house and shaving the word count on my current book-in-progress.

My youngest had a sore throat Sunday night. Scratchy voice Monday morning. Constant sneezing, complete with enough slime to put an army of snails out of business.

The thing is, caring for kids during illness requires mindful parenting under stress. It's a delicate balance between unlimited cuddles for the patient and unforgiving annihilation of every germ on the premises—so while the youngest slept, the oldest and I cleaned like maniacs. By Tuesday morning my voice was going out, the post-nasal party was on, and a distinct sense of broiled eyeballs clued me in to a low grade fever. So the oldest went to work. And I took the youngest to the walk-in.

Covid. Both of us.

I gave up on the cleaning, did my best to keep up with the writing. By Wednesday morning my little one was a little better, which worked out because she needed to be self-sufficient while I slept, sweat-soaked and miserable, under a mountain of blankets. She woke me up once, late in the afternoon, with the quiet reminder she utters so often these days: "You need to eat, Mom." And I wasn't hungry, but in that moment, cheese cubes and sliced hot dogs tasted exactly like sixteen-year-old love. "Soft foods for your throat," she said, "but some protein too."

Thursday it hit the oldest. A little congestion. Super sore throat. It would have been fine, except that Thursday was packing day, the house we were scheduled to sit in was already empty, and it was far too late to back out even if we wanted to (which is fine, since we didn't). Geriatric dog bladders don't wait. Fortunately, our packing skills are top-notch, our teamwork is iron-clad, and where one is weak another is strong. Around noon, we piled into the house panting and exhausted, tossed our bags into our rooms, and spent the rest of the week dazed but content to be together.

No plans. No work. No school. No church. No social outings. Just the three of us, sprawled at intervals on the couch, sipping herbal teas we couldn't smell, slowly building miniature cumulus clouds of crumpled Kleenex.

We took turns keeping each other fed and watered. We shared a bag of gummy sharks and (finally) watched Moana 2. And right there in the middle of our half-rooted, half-rootless adventure, I faintly heard the heartbeat of home: small rituals, intentional gestures, and a quiet sense of pride in the young women my daughters have become.

And in the hearing of that soft but unmistakable pulse, I stopped feeling uprooted, like a vagabond always on the go. I stopped feeling like an itinerant wanderer, a leaf floating from place to place, adrift on life's current. And I became a wayfarer, traveling from place to place purely for the joy of doing it. A sojourner who briefly stops here or there to rest and refuel, moving often but not at all rootless.

Because we've got our own home to go to, but home isn't about walls or ownership or who's name is on the mailbox. Home is the place where love grows, blooming like flowers in the mundane moments and selfless sacrifices we make individually for the good of the whole. That's the home we carry with us—not in backpacks or duffel bags, but in moments and gestures. We pour it into hot cups of tea like medicine and drizzle it like perfume into a hot bath. Sometimes, if we're twenty-one and still learning to balance the transition from child to adult, we might secretly smooth it over a sick mother's sleeping forehead as we gently brush stray hairs away.

*****

If love begins at home and home is love in action, maybe that's why it's so easy for us to miss those things even when they're right in front of us. Because the fact is, love doesn’t always look like big accomplishments and mountaintop moments. More often, it looks like snotty noses and a constant stream of fingerprint-smudged water glasses. It looks like a reminder to eat when you’d rather crawl back under the covers. It looks like productivity, sacrificed on the altar of mindful presence.

Home isn’t lost just because you’re sleeping under a different roof. Home is carried in the rhythm of small things and everyday mercies. It's in every conscious choice to put love first—even when you’re tired, cranky, and pretty sure you might literally cough up a lung.

I may be a sojourner for now, traveling from house to house and writing wherever the bags land, but I’m also more deeply rooted than ever—in the love I share with my daughters, in the little ways we care for each other, and in the God who never lets us out of sight no matter where we go.

And if you’ve ever felt a little untethered, or found yourself building pockets of stability even in places that weren’t really yours, I hope you know this: you are not rootless. You are not alone. And in the end, it’s the love we carry from pocket to pocket that teaches us how to…

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