Our youngest daughter, a high school freshman, returned home from Japan yesterday morning. She was gone for eight days. While happy for her to travel to and learn about life in another country, we all remained worried and nervous.
Unbeknownst to our youngest daughter, and on the same day she left for Japan, a Malaysian flight headed form Beijing, China to somewhere in Vietnam went off radar and had not been seen or heard from again.
Theories from UFO an on board explosion as the result of two passengers carrying false passport to intervention by an UFO abound.
Now some nine days since the flight disappeared, authorities are directing their search around the belief that the someone person or persons took control from the commercial pilots of flying the plan and directed it else where.
The most scary aspect is that no signs of the have been found, nor have they washed ashore. A massive search across the South China Sea and eastern parts of the Indian Ocean have been and are still underway.
The emotions and fears of our entire family slipped from red alert when I texted our two elder daughters that, “The eagle had landed,” and our youngest daughter, their baby sister was safe in my and my husband’s arms hugging me and her Dad.
This sense of emotional bonding and connectedness that emerged and revealed itself as a result of and during the time our youngest daughter was away took me back to my own childhood.
Reflecting on the lack of close relationships and connection in my family of origin I began to ache for all that did not exist, the invisible walls that separated us and our lives, leaving us I am now certain, to the lonely exile of our lives as individuals, members of a family, but afloat on a sea all our own, and alone.
While our youngest was away, all of us in my present family of husband and three daughters, commented at one time or another of feeling incomplete and less than, both as a family and as an individual living with the absence of our youngest daughter and sister.
I never experienced that in my family of origin until my father died of a heart attack and then subsequently eighteen months later my brother and only sibling died as a result of drowning.
What could have been … and never was.
This is the emotional legacy I carry when looking back upon my family of origin against the canvas of my present family.
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