“Everybody has a home team: It’s the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. It’s the people who, near or far, know everything that’s wrong with you and love you anyways. These are the ones who tell you their secrets, who get themselves a glass of water without asking when they’re at your house. These are the people who cry when you cry. These are your people, your middle-of-the-night, no-matter-what people.” – unknown

Having grown up all over the country, moving every few years and starting as the new kid in school over and over again, I really learned to appreciate the value of having a home team. Over the years of your life you will have friends who come and go, and dating relationships that start and stop, and coworkers who move on, even marriages that begin and end unfortunately, but the one consistent group of people who stay a part of your life through thick and thin…your home team…is your family.

I am one of ten kids in my family. I have five brothers and four sisters. As kids moving from one location to the next we had to learn to rely on each other. Even when we were the new kids in school over and over again we always had a least one sibling or more attending that same school with us…we always had at least someone on our home team around we could to turn to. Sure we had our times of picking on each other and fighting with each other, as many siblings tend to do, but we always knew that when the going got tough or push came to shove we could 100% count on knowing that our siblings would have our back. We were one another’s home team.

I was recently reminded of just how important having my home team is to me. I was having a particularly difficult couple of days and as I started driving home from work I found myself driving the car toward my parent’s house instead of my own. When I walked through their front door I was hit with this intense feeling of “…It’s all going to be okay…you’re home….”  As I sat talking and crying with my parents, I felt a profound sense of recognition of how incredibly blessed I was to have a home team. I am so blessed to have both my parents still alive and able to participate in my life, and I know there are so many others out there who would give anything to have their parents still living as I do. I recognize how lucky I am to go and see them or pick up the phone and call them anytime, day or night, and know they will answer. They are the people I know I can call whenever something terrible happens in my life and they will be there for me. They are the people who know every good and bad thing about me and will always love me anyway. They are the people who cry when I cry, and who hurt with me when I hurt. They are my home team. They are my family.

It’s so easy in life to take our families for granted. Yet the only people who are always going to be there for us, through thick and thin, from beginning to end, are our parents and our siblings, our children and our grandchildren, and if we live long enough our great grandchildren. They are our home team. They are forever. We need to love them, appreciate them, and be grateful for every moment we are blessed to have them still alive and available to us. Everyone else may come and go in your life but family is forever!

Thanks to my Mom and Dad for being such amazing captains of my home team!

~Amy Rees Anderson