People keep asking me how I feel about our big move. Honestly, I have all the emotions you might expect – excited, scared, overwhelmed – so that is what I tell them. But then the follow up question is how am I coping with all of this, and that answer is surprisingly simple “I’m the mom.” I am sure they think I am being flippant, but I am not.
When you are on an airplane and your hit turbulence, do the flight attendants look nervous? Usually not. If they do look nervous, be honest, you get more nervous too. The same is true with moms. And before you wonder, this is not a knock on dads. When our daughter was little, my husband and I realized that if she fell or hurt herself, she looked to us for how she should react. If we were calm, she was calm. There were more than a few times when I silently cringed, but because I didn’t react, she didn’t cry. So that is how I am approaching the move.
I know I am extremely fortunate to have this opportunity, but today was not my finest and I had a bit of a pity party. It’s lonely holding down the fort and getting things ready for the move. Yes, my other half is lonely too since he is already in The Netherlands. He is working and traveling a lot to keep his mind off it. I’m here taking the full brunt of living with a teenager. And just because…our fence is broken on one side. We have done some emergency repairs to keep it upright while they build a new house on that side, but the wind this weekend helped another section start to fail. So I had the moody teenager help me (very reluctantly) and we MacGyvered it with some string to help hold it up for tonight.
Tomorrow is a new day.
Red, White and Tulips 