So, strangely enough, tomorrow marks 25 years since I was released as a missionary, and it’ll be the day Tomas is released as a missionary himself. So naturally I’m looking both back and ahead.
Back when I was released, my parents came to pick me up in Germany. It was a bizarre feeling, going from being a missionary one moment to being a son the next. (Not that I’d stopped being a son ever, but there’s a huge difference between living on your own and living with your parents.) I think it’s good that Tomas is going to have the plane ride back on his own. It gives a nice bookend to the mission: a visible threshold he crosses to show he’s heading into the next stage of his life.
I don’t honestly remember much from my first month of being home. I must have been home for Christmas, but I can’t point to anything that felt significantly different to me. It was another Christmas, blending in with all the other Christmases I’d had at home? I do remember my first semester back at BYU, which was one of the more difficult times in my life up to that point. I had gone to college before my mission for a year, and when I came back, none of my friends were around from before, and I felt very alone, even though I was surrounded by tens of thousands of people.
Some of that is likely because I went from a mission, with a finite number of people working together for a single purpose, to college, where I felt like I just blended in with the crowd. I don’t think Tomas will face the same thing, mainly because he’ll be at BYU for the first time, so there’s nothing to compare it to. He’ll also have all his current social group still there for him on Facebook. When I left my mission, I left behind pretty much everyone. Staying in touch was difficult at best. Now? He’s been on Facebook this whole time. and all his mission friends (and many of the people he met in Slovakia) are still right there. I would think there’ll be less whiplash for him.
People keep asking if I’m excited to have Tomas come home, and the answer’s an obvious yes. It’ll be strange to have him back. I can’t imagine what it was like for parents back before there were the weekly video calls with their missionaries. To go from only hearing from them once a week in letters (that may or may not have been very detailed) to having them fully back . . . there’d be a lot of getting to know each other again. There will still be some of that, I expect, but not as stark as previously.
Mainly, I keep looking at things I do by myself these days that I’ll be able to do with Tomas, at least for a bit. Playing certain video games, going to Magic the Gathering events, watching football, watching certain movies. That’ll be a lot of fun. Yes, he’ll just be home for a month and a half before he heads out to BYU, but then he’ll be back again in April. I imagine having a college student will be a fair bit different than having a missionary, but I suppose that remains to be seen.
I learned a lot on my mission, but it took some time for me to be able to start putting what I learned about life and myself to use. It takes time to remember what it’s like to be home and be “normal.” Some of it involves getting to know yourself again. It’s not that you get brainwashed on a mission, but more that you are fully devoted to just one thing. You don’t need to worry about a family or a job. If I went from being a librarian one day to being . . . an engineer the next, there’d be the same sort of dizziness.
As a parent, I’ll do my best to make that process as easy on him as I can. There aren’t many other experiences like it. Starting your career. Getting married. Having a child. Losing a loved one. Times where you go from life being one way to life being a different way.
In any case, he’s in Prague at the moment. In about 10 hours or so, he’ll be heading to the airport. He’ll fly from Prague to Brussels to New York to Portland, and then we’ll pick him up tomorrow evening. Assuming his flight’s on time (knock on wood), he and I will then go to Bangor for him to be released as a missionary. (This basically involves meeting with his stake president and having a brief conversation about his mission and what he’ll be up to next.) Then we’ll drive back home, and that’s that.
I’m excited, yes. I’m also nervous, though I’m not completely sure why. Probably because all of this also involves changes for a parent and a family as well. We’ll see how it all goes.