This feeling I get....

Ever since I was small, when someone had come to visit and then left, I felt really sad (most of the time it was my Auntie Patti, since she was really the only person in my life that lived far away when I was small and would come to visit and then leave again). I remember distinctly, all through school, not being sure what the feeling was. I remember telling my mother I felt "weird" or "funny". I think it was a lack of understanding about what sadness felt like, since I lived a particularly charmed life and rarely felt sad.

This sadness has always manifested itself physically for me. It sits in my chest and rumbles in my belly. It makes my heart beat faster and it feels sort of like low-level flu. No wonder I never knew how to describe it to my mother. How does an 11-year-old describe an emotion that is rearing it's head physically?

As I got older, the feeling continued. Usually far worse when someone had been to visit me as opposed to the other way around. For whatever reason, when I visited others and then left to go back home (or visited home and left to go back to wherever I was living), the feeling was never as strong. I did that a lot in my 20s, since I lived far away from most family and friends for the better part of a decade. I think it was because I was going back, to where my life was, which I missed, and that made the sadness of leaving people I loved less pointed; less strong.

I begun have the feeling when I leave a place, too. Every weekend, when we, as a family, would travel to Vermont to ski, and then on Sundays head back home, I would have a twinge of that ever-growing-more-familiar feeling of sadness. I hated leaving Vermont and the friends and famiy who we spent time with there. Nobody lived there; everyone lived back where we did, so it wasn't the people I was mourning. I was sad about leaving Vermont and the snow and the relaxation. The sadness I feel driving home on Sundays from Vermont has strengthened as I've gotten older. My friend Kathleen understands this feeling because she gets it too. We will often say "I have that leaving-Vermont feeling" and each of us knows explicitly what that means.

I still hate this feeling - this sadness that pulls at me. My sister visited this weekend and stayed at my house in Boston. Since she lived with my parents close by Boston for 3 years leading up to getting married and has been in NJ this past year, I think this is the first time she's stayed over with me in a long long while. We've slept in the same place in that time, but not in my house. It was really nice. And when I left her off at the bus station at mid-day, the icky feeling enveloped me as I drove away. It's silly, since I will see her again next weekend when she and her husband come up for the weekend. I tried to talk myself out of it; I stopped at the SOWA Artisan fair to distract myself; but as I sit here and write this about 2 hours later, I still have the feeling in my gut.

I suppose I should be grateful. This feeling is a wonderful indicator for me of what is really important to me - of what I really love. It has given me information over time. I used to sign my emails home when I lived abroad "Love and Missing" because for me, loving someone in a closing is nice, but missing them is much more of a compliment.

I really enjoy having people come to visit. I welcome them with open arms, but I still have to prepare myself for when they leave and the bitter-sweet sadness that will come with it. When I forget to prepare, like this morning, it's harder to shake. I'm off myself today, on a trip to Atlanta for a training. Hopefully the hustle and bustle of that trip will distract me. I think it will.