You Can't Go Home Again... Or Can You?

Last week I took my kids to Tulsa, Oklahoma - the town where I grew up. My family hasn’t lived in Tulsa for years and my children have never been there. Before we left I drove them around, showing them my childhood neighborhood, the house where I grew up, my elementary and high schools and my very favorite fast-food restaurant. As he stood in front of the house where I grew up, Ben said, “I’m going to do this with my kids someday.” Nothing would make me happier than if he did just that.


When I left high school, I went across the country to college and came home infrequently, not even spending much of my summers in Tulsa due to my cheerleading schedule. Eventually, my parents moved to Texas and I stopped going there altogether, putting distance between me and the friends I had known there.

During one of my brief visits from college, I argued with a friend. We were drinking and emotions ran high. In the heat of the moment, my friend said hurtful things. And by a terrible twist of fate, those things struck the perfect nerve for maximum damage. They were just words and I should have shrugged them off as such, but I took them in and those words changed how I felt about my time in Tulsa and the friends I knew there.

Where my parents move created physical distance, this argument – these words – created emotional distance between me and my hometown and all that it represented. I drifted further and further away and before I knew it, I had absolutely no ties to the place I had lived for the first 18 years of my life. The place where I took my first steps, made my first friends, fell in love for the first time and experienced my first real heartbreak.

Over the years that followed I occasionally made feeble attempts to reconnect with people from that time. I attended my ten-year reunion, every five or six years I made contact with the person I considered my best friend from that time, I had dinner with whomever happened to be living in the same city as I. But nothing ever came of these tenuous advances. I never followed up – nothing ever took root. I remained isolated from my hometown - this place and the people there who once meant the world to me. The place and the people who were so instrumental in shaping me. The place and the people who built me, who made me “me.”

And that’s how things remained, until a couple of years ago when I ran across Facebook for maybe the 100th time. I’d never been particularly interested in social networking, but on this day, I entered some basic information about myself hoping it might lead me to a friend I’d known in my 20s in Dallas. After entering that basic information, the first person Facebook spewed from its database as "someone I might know" was the friend who had spoken the hurtful words that had made such an impact on me so many years ago. That odd coincidence might have caused me to close that window and never return, and maybe on another day I would have done just that. But on this particular day, I took that odd coincidence as a sign. A sign that it was time to face some demons and reclaim what I had lost. I thought for several minutes and then clicked the “add as friend” icon.

That one click started the dominoes falling that finally led me back to Tulsa. The friend I had argued with so many years ago was the catalyst. The gateway. And perhaps that's exactly as it should be.  In many ways I had held this person responsible for taking my hometown - this place and these people - away from me, but I’ve come to realize that no one can take something from me that I’m not willing to give. Letting Tulsa slip away was my own doing. And reclaiming it was as easy as simply deciding to do it.

I visited Tulsa last year for the first time in 15 years. I saw old friends, caught up on the past 25 years and revisited old haunts. It was a wonderful weekend, but this year was even better because I took Ben and Lucy with me. There was something cathartic about showing my kids around the city where I grew up. Liberating, healing… victorious, even. I hope that one day Ben and Lucy really will show their children the place where they grew up. The house they lived in, the schools they attended, the places they remember the most. I just hope they aren’t gone from this place, or these people – the place and the people who are helping to build them - for such a long time before they do it.

Who says you can’t go home again? Not me. Not anymore.