What would we do without our family?

Kaity Holtman

We made the move back “home” two and a half years ago.

After graduating college, we lived in Raymore, south of Kansas City, for 15 months. During that time, I worked out of our home and drove to my office in Columbia at least once a week. Matt worked as an engineer.

We were bad at making friends down there.

Why?

Because I can count on one hand how many times we stayed at our house over a weekend.

Every weekend, we were either at home, in Columbia, or traveling around the state for work or a wedding.

There came a point when we looked at each other and said, “What are we doing?”

We were investing our money in a house — and a whole lot of gas money — that we weren’t even using the way a home is meant to be used.

It was like a storage unit for our stuff and a hotel during the week.

Now, don’t get me wrong, our time living away from everyone else was good for us. That’s when we really started to rely on one another and became a team. I believe our move there was part of our story for a reason.

But when we asked ourselves why we were living there, we found that we were trying to let our lives revolve around our family from way too far away.

We knew we wanted to be near family, but we felt like we weren’t supposed to move home yet (I’ve written about that before …).

But, my goodness, what was the point of just trying to make a point?

We knew where we wanted to be; we just had to give up our pride and make it happen.

And now that we’re here, we ask ourselves all the time — most recently Sunday night after a weekend full of family time — “How in the world do we survive without our family?”

We realize we are so incredibly blessed to have big, tight-knit families. We know not everyone gets that.

And, I promise, we don’t take it for granted. I couldn’t tell you how many times this weekend feelings of gratefulness overwhelmed me.

Our nieces and nephews light up our lives, and we love seeing them grow and learn week after week.

We’re both close with all our siblings, and our parents are the best parents of all time.

And we’re here to spend time with our grandparents instead of regretting someday that we never saw them enough.

When we let our lives intertwine with our families’ lives, we start to build our schedules around the right types of things, I think.

Then, when we build our schedules around our families, we’re happier at the end of the day, the week, the year.

And I know every family has a scuff here and there, but in the end, there always seems to be something that brings us back together and appreciate what we have.

Our families are support systems, cheerleaders, clean-up crews after events, life consultants, labor forces, emergency grocery stores, and so much more.