An awful lot comes down to perspective.
I’m chatting with my daughter on Facebook; we don’t get to talk every day since she moved cross-country. A reminder came up of the tussle it used to be getting her and her stepsister to go to school.
“I’m so sorry about that, Mom,” she tells me. I assure her I wasn’t traumatized. Then she apologizes for a whole list of other things.
I wasn’t prompting for an apology, and she understood that. Although every kid will present challenges, she was pretty darned easy to raise in the grand scheme of things. I know. I’ve seen less easy.
It’s just that being on her own a month, she’s seeing the world through different eyes. She’s been introduced to some of her own foibles in others, and she’s been in the position of being responsible for a lot more than she was at home. She’s had to take care of business in a way she never has before. It changes things. She respected me before, appreciated both her Dad and I, but it takes on a new depth when faced with the scope. Y’kno?
It moves me–and like everything else about this whole damn empty nest thing, it’s bittersweet. The goal all along has always been to raise an independent adult. But I’m kind of sad I can’t spare her from the stress of growing up, either…