A Step Forward
On homecomings, high hopes, and the tour that became something else entirely
I spent Mother’s Day weekend in Orlando with my mom and I want to start there because it set the tone for everything this week was actually about.
It was not elaborate. A few years ago I took her to Italy for Mother’s Day, which is a hard act to follow and I will not pretend otherwise. This year it was happy hour on Friday where we got a little tipsy and could not stop laughing, massages on Saturday which we both needed more than we realized, and a brunch on Sunday that I made for her which did not quite come together the way I had planned and then an elegant dinner on Sunday night.
My mother and I have always had an I Love Lucy quality to us, which I mean as the highest compliment. Things go sideways and we just keep going, laughing at ourselves somewhere in the middle of it.
It was not the most glamorous Mother’s Day but it was the kind of weekend that reminds you what the holiday is actually for. Time. Presence. The particular comfort of being with someone who has known you your whole life and loves you anyway.
If you still have your mother, hold that close. Not just on Sunday. Any day you can.
Tomorrow I will get on a plane to Detroit, which feels like its own kind of transition. The last few visits have mostly been for funerals these last few years. Hard visits, heavy visits, the kind where you are in and out before the city even registers.
This time is different. I am going back for my high school reunion, which is its own kind of time warp, and to see family under circumstances that are not defined by loss for once. Detroit has done some real reinventing of its own since I was growing up there and I am curious to see it with fresh eyes. More on that next week.
This tour was supposed to be something else entirely. When I first mapped it out it was going to be my exit lap, the goodbye circuit before I headed back to Europe for another chapter. See some people, tie up some loose ends, and then off again. That was the plan.
It has not felt like that at all.
What it has felt like is a homecoming tour. Every city, every catch up, every conversation that starts with wait, you are moving back has had a warmth to it that I was not expecting. People are excited. Not in a polite way but in a genuine, come visit me when you get settled, I cannot wait to actually see you regularly kind of way. And I keep sitting with how different that feels from what I imagined this announcement would be like.
I spent a long time thinking that moving back would feel like a step backward. Like I was returning to something I had already done, already outgrown, already left for a reason. And I want to be honest about the fact that it does not feel that way at all. It feels like a step forward. Like the version of me who is going back is someone the city has not met yet, and I am actually curious about what that looks like.
The nomad chapter was real and I do not regret a single part of it. But I think I needed all of it, every country, every apartment, every fresh start in a new city, to get clear enough to choose somewhere deliberately. And I have chosen. The return is coming and I am ready for it.
After Detroit it is New York, and then I will be back in Austin before the month is over.
I cannot wait.
Après Me,
Sherita