Normal

I am always guessing at what normal is. It is a textbook issue for people who were raised in the kind of environment I was. Sometimes it feels residual; a thin layer of insecurity that I am able to wipe away with truthful affirmations. Sometimes it is a deep root that can only be pulled out with much force and by someone with more strength and wisdom than I.

Every kid starts out his or her life with a certain level of isolation and inexperience. This is magnified in a home full of secrets. The typical people in my life were living lives of addiction and chaos. I didn't really understand how different my family was until I began to socialize outside of our culture. To me, stability, intact families, joyful interactions, and faith were the aberrants. It took a long time for me to notice they existed, longer for me to realize they were desirable, and even longer to recognize they were possibilities for my own life.

All that to explain why my views of normalcy are skewed. My basic assumption is still that I am probably not, and everybody else probably is.

The truth is that we are probably all not. Or that we probably all are. If we all aren't, than that means I am. And if we all are, than that means I certainly am not. Because I do a lot of things that can't be normal. Or maybe they are.

I have a family of my own now. We are pretty stable and very committed to loving each other well. There is a lot of joy in our home, and we are faithfully following God's lead as best we can. We are recovering from our hurts and hangups rather than hiding from them. Still, we have problems to fix, failures to be forgiven, messes to clean up, fears to be faced, and questions to be answered. Questions like, "Where is my dang hairbrush?", and "Are we normal?"

The answer? It's probably under the couch.

And yes, I think so. Or maybe not.