The Mailbox Isn't There Anymore

My mom forwarded me an email this week. The place where she both worked and lived was changing their PO Box number and as a result, everyone was going to get their own street-side mailbox. Gone would be the communal number that all mail was sent to, collected daily from the little post office 4 minutes away, then carefully (or haphazardly, depending on the person) sorted into individual metal-plated slots in the admin building.

She reminded me that I would need to start compiling a list of addresses to send the new PO Box number to. I heaved a huge sigh at the thought. I was thousands of miles away and for the matter, how did one notify of an address change? Did the US postal service provide a free address card? Did you have to send out little postcards and pay for every one? Now I would have to go through the tedious task of updating all my legal addresses, such as bank statements and driver's license. It was tiring.

Frustrated, I shot an email back asking all my questions. I wondered why I was so upset about something so small. After all, people moved all the time and somehow their mail got forwarded to them. Or was it really that simple? It was then that it hit me. I was mourning yet another loss.

I lived with the same PO Box number for 18 years. That was nearly half my lifetime. Granted, I wanted to leave the place associated with the number for about 16 of those years, and though even today, when I return, I don't do so with a happy heart to be in that physical location, it still represents something more than a number; it represents stability.

For 18 years, my mail came to the same address. When a PO Box number disappears, what happens to the mail? It's impossible to remember every single business that has sent mail to that address. Does the mail get lost? Does it disappear forever, dropped into one huge bin in the middle of Kansas labeled "unknown?"

I felt somewhat shaken, as if losing a PO Box number meant losing a solid marker that affirmed I was there, I existed, I was. When I returned to Egypt, I found my picture up on the Wall of Fame, along with pictures of other missionary families. I looked carefully at a smiling face, innocent still of the many collisions in the road of life ahead. In that moment, I stood still, dressed in a frilly blue dress, and I knew who I was and where I was. I never knew more than 25 years later I would return to the photo to reassure myself that I was indeed there.

This is the difficult part about life that TCKs must learn to accept. The reality that the things and places and people which defined our identity are not grounded in our present time. The years pass and things grow old, like my see-through thin bunny my mother made for me when I was a year and a half old, its filling replaced thrice over, its sides clumsily re-stitched with red and white and black thread. Places go through political turmoil, or a PO Box number changes, or the lawn where we caught lightning bugs and kept them in a jar has disappeared beneath a clunky health spa dusty from disuse. People let us fade out of the pictures of their lives, like a 50-year old sheet of yellowing onion skin paper, and when we pass again they introduce us to their kids who are the age we were when we climbed trees together.

I heard an earth-shattering song today. In the middle of the words about accepting a call and following where God wants us to go, the author wrote, I will go and let this journey be my home. I cried. This is it. This is our life. Our homes must, of necessity, be mourned as losses simply because our identity was never one that could hold to a single existence. The PO Box was always going to be transient even as we were. Yet in the midst of the ethereal was this knowing. We are not searching for, holding on to, or waiting in anticipation of finally finding a home.

Our journey is our home.