Hi again. Sorry I've been quiet for a while - after sorting out the flooding issues temporarily, it was thankfully time to go on vacation. While we were away, some major renovations were supposedly done to fix the problems permanently, but I have to admit that we've been too scared to test whether things are now working the way they should! Eventually we'll find out - for the meantime, my daughter's using the other bathroom until I'm brave enough to let her try out her own.
I now have one daughter in university - I took her to her new school a couple of weeks ago. We'd been on vacation in the US, and from there my husband took our son to his boarding school, and I took our daughter to her university, both in Canada. I didn't expect to feel any different from the usual back-to school blahs, since she spent the whole of junior and senior high school away from home. Somehow, though, it feels different. Maybe it's because I know there are no teachers looking over her shoulder to make sure she's doing the right thing, maybe its because she's semi-independent (still funded by Bank of Mom and Dad!) and she's going to have to learn how to stick to a budget, keep herself on track, and a million other things that we either used to do for her or knew were being done for her in boarding school. Thank God for modern-day technology though - we're thousands of miles away from each other, but between Skype, Twitter and e-mail, we keep in touch daily and talk at least every two days (usually initiated by her and I'm sure glad that she still likes to talk with her mother - hope that never changes!).
It's still a big adjustment for me - she'll be 18 in less than 3 weeks and legally an adult - thankfully the drinking age in Ontario is 19! I use her as an example still for my patients with colicky babies, and its hard to imagine that now she's this beautiful and smart young woman who's more than half-way out of the nest. I remember when I first moved from Nigeria to Canada, and I was on the plane with two children under 6 - my husband was already in Canada waiting for us. I suddenly had the wrenching realization that I didn't know when, or if, I would see my parents again, and looking at my children, I also realized that they would likely grow up and do exactly the same thing to me! I seriously wondered, that day on the plane, why people bother to have children when they are just going to leave them one day, and now I'm on the brink of having that happen to me. Luckily, its a gradual process for most of us, so there's time to adapt and get used to that idea. If you're lucky, they come back home - not necessarily to live though! I know that even though I'm the eldest in my family and moved out the earliest, I can also claim to be the child who's moved back home the most, usually with children in tow, while transitioning in one form or the other! I've always been welcomed back with open arms, and we all know that its just a temporary stop in my itinerant journey. Hopefully my children will feel they can always come back home and be welcomed with open arms.
No comments:
Post a Comment