Coming Home

Some of my core memories of feeling at home from my childhood involve my Grandma Jo. Whether it was predawn cuddles on her couch or watching her dance down the driveway to greet us during our twice-a-year visits from Tennessee, I felt most at home with her.

My mother was one of five children, and she was the only one to leave Iowa when she married my dad and moved to Tennessee. She worked hard to keep us connected to her siblings, nieces, nephews, and the place she called home.

If you've heard me speak, you know I have a moderate-to-strong southeastern U.S. dialect, depending on where you land on the urban-to-hills-and-hollers spectrum. So when I say my deepest family roots are in Iowa, I often get a sideways look. Are you sure? You don't sound like you're from Iowa.

For much of my life, I've carried a quiet sense that my roots were somewhere else.

Most of my friends growing up in Tennessee had grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins nearby. They were multiple-generation kids. Around my hometown, people often wanted to know who your people were—who were your kin? "My family isn't from around here," never seemed like a satisfactory answer. It left me with the sense that I belonged somewhere else.

In all of that, there was always my grandmother. She was home.

When she died three years ago, I wondered what it would feel like to return to Iowa without her there. She died in February, and that June I returned for our annual family gathering at my aunt's home. One of our first stops is often to our family's century farm, where my uncle now faithfully stewards the land. He took my dad and I on a drive around the property, pointing out landmarks and telling stories that have shaped our family.

Without my grandmother there, grief settled in. But so did an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Her home had been sold nearly a decade earlier, and the dancing down the driveway had slowed long before that. I found myself wondering, Where would I find home without her?

The answer surprised me.

My uncle has given our family a tremendous gift by caring for this land and the stories it holds. Home was never just my grandmother's house. It was the people who loved me there. It was the fields where generations of my family sowed and harvested. It was the stories and a place that had been quietly shaping me long before I realized it.

Now, each year when I return, I stop at my grandmother's headstone. She shares it with my grandfather, Bob Fry. On the other side is my Grandpa Jim, my grandmother's second husband and the man I also knew as Grandpa. From that spot I can see my cousin Lindsay's stone, my Uncle Jim's, my great-grandparents', and so many others. To the east is the home where my grandparents lived. To the south is our family farm.

This is home.

This is the closest I've come to explaining what coaching has been like for me.

In both my certification and endorsement processes, I've been asked to describe how I found coaching. The closest I can come is this: it feels like coming home to myself, to the way I am shaped to serve in the world.

In one way or another, I've been doing this for a long time—getting curious, asking questions, making space for people to hear themselves more clearly. Coaching didn't make me into someone different. It gave language, practice, and purpose to something that has been emerging for a long time.

I'm grateful for that feeling of coming home. Grateful to have found work that feels deeply aligned with who I am. And grateful that, every now and then, I get to walk alongside someone else as they recognize a little more clearly what has been true of them all along.

Home, I'm learning, isn't always about returning to a place.

Sometimes it's discovering that you've been making your way toward yourself all along.

*If stories of family, place, and legacy are your kind of thing, my uncle Greg and cousin Brittney sat down a couple of years ago for a conversation about the history of our family farm in Jefferson County, Iowa. It's a story marked by heartbreak and loss, but even more by perseverance, grace, and the love that carried one generation into the next. Listening to it was a gift and gave me an even deeper appreciation for the legacy I'm grateful to call my own. Here’s the link if you’d like to watch: https://youtu.be/IXVaElk1u7c?si=4xkoGnhFbofRoWDb.