Idaha-Ho-ho-ho

My sister and I returned from Boise, where the five of us Klaas Sisters met for a few days. It amazes me that I'm finally able to cross the border between Idaho and Oregon without those nervous butterfly feelings in my tummy. For years, each time I traveled home for family encounters, no matter how brief, I armed myself with defensive thinking.

Poor me! None of my siblings (or parents, who are now dead) understands me.

Of course not! I'd escaped home when each of them were children, with diminishing and sketchy contact thereafter. During my convent years, and especially when I began to gradually free myself of a conservative Catholic view of the world, my Idaho siblings remained firmly entrenched in theirs. Nineteen years after I'd left home to become a nun, I kicked both the black "habit" of the nun and my belief in Catholicism. Widening the every increasing gap of understanding between family and me.

The rest of the story is what I'm working on now. . .again and for the umpteenth time. . .in my memoirs. I accredit the fact that I've gradually been able to return to and embrace them to many healing factors, including my writing. It's been a painful journey, but well worth the putting of one foot in front of the other over these many years. The trips to Idaho have finally become entirely pain free. . .and even enjoyable. Something I would have thought impossible even five years ago.