Finding My Way Back

Life has a way of throwing unexpected challenges our way, and our first few years home were some of the hardest I’ve faced.

Moving back home should bring comfort and familiarity, right?

But what happens when the home you return to has changed so dramatically that it feels almost unrecognizable?

Two years ago, everything began to unravel.

My job at the time was understaffed, the stress was mounting, and I was reaching my breaking point. Working in an industry connected to low-income housing brought a constant stream of complicated problems, and the pressure felt relentless.

Then came the news that my dad had terminal, inoperable cancer.

We had months left with him.

I told my workplace I needed some time to process what was happening and support my family.

And then something happened that no parent is prepared for.

Someone hurt my child.

As a mother, there is this primal instinct to protect your child and fight. You want to fix it. You want to make it go away.

But life doesn’t work that way.

You have to stay calm. You have to navigate systems. You have to support your child while somehow controlling every instinct inside you that wants to take over and make everything better.

My job.

My dad dying.

My child’s pain.

Those three things, on top of moving our entire lives back to Canada after ten years in Europe, finally pushed me past my limit.

I lost my footing for a while.

I found myself in a place I had never been before.

Then my workplace let me go without cause.

At the time, it felt like one more thing going wrong. Looking back, it may have been exactly what I needed.

I went on EI and was provided with counselling—28 weeks to help me make sense of everything that had happened.

My counsellors pointed out that any one of these events could have knocked someone sideways. I had all three happening while still adjusting to a major international move.

It was time to stop.

So I did.

Well, sort of.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not particularly good at doing nothing.

Between therapy sessions, I threw myself into anything that kept me moving.

Because I had already started, I studied and passed my property management certification for the second time in my life, determined that this time I was actually going to use it.

I travelled back and forth to the mainland to see Dad. I reconnected with my siblings. We talked about old wounds and tried to mend some of them while there was still time.

And I gardened.

Good Lord, did I garden.

Every weed was gone. Every branch was pruned. If a plant looked at me the wrong way, it was probably getting trimmed.

I walked for miles. I worked out for hours.

Mostly, I kept moving while I worked through the anger, grief and hurt.

But eventually I also learned how to stop trying to fix everything.

That was harder.

I leaned on my mom, my girlfriends, my siblings and my family. I began to understand that I didn’t have to carry everything myself.

Most importantly, I learned to let my child heal in their own way and on their own timeline.

That was their journey, not mine to control.

And I made peace with my father.

Not with some imaginary version of the father I wished he had been, but with the man he actually was.

Who he was.

And who he wasn’t.

That mattered.

Slowly, I found my way back.

I retrained. I regrouped. I went back to work.

And somewhere along the way, I learned something about forgiveness.

Forgiveness isn’t necessarily saying that what someone did was okay.

Sometimes it is simply deciding that you don’t want to carry it anymore.

When Dad finally died, the grief was enormous.

And I realized I wasn’t grieving only him.

I was grieving everything.

My father. My child’s pain. My job. Europe. The life we had left behind. The family relationships that had changed. The version of Canada I remembered. Maybe even the version of myself I had been before all of it happened.

It was a lot of loss packed into a very short period of time.

But here I am.

I got through it.

Not untouched. Not magically transformed into some perfectly enlightened person who has everything figured out.

Just different.

A little wiser.

A lot more understanding of what other people might be carrying around that we know absolutely nothing about.

And perhaps most importantly, I know now that when life falls apart, I can put myself back together.

Maybe not exactly the way I was before.

But perhaps that’s the point.