Making The Best of Weekly Goodbyes

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We had a tough goodbye this past week. Splitting time between two households for a young child must be incredibly difficult. Because I had a mother and father married and living in the same house growing up, I will never truly know what that feels like. But I do know what it feels like to have a much loved stepchild come and go from our house every week.

Life at her other home is incredibly unstable and difficult on her and it breaks my heart every week to have to deliver her back to that place. Rest assured that we have over many years done everything we can to ensure her safety and well-being and continue to do that. But we have to follow court procedure, etc. I am sure I am not the only stepmom frustrated with that reality.

In our home we all get sad the day we know she is leaving. We had to find a way to combat that for all our sakes. It all starts by everyone getting sad and on edge and at times disintegrate from there. So we all decided that for all our sakes we should decide not to spend one minute of our time together unhappy and sulking. We should love every moment and make the most of it. We were only hurting ourselves if we let something we couldn't change bring unhappiness to us, especially on our last day of the week together.

Do we still get sad, absolutely, but do we join together and chase those blues out the door and remind each other that we are going to love every moment we have together? YES! Because we all understand that sadness, we can help each other overcome it quickly with gentle reminders and lots of hugs. It's amazing that we all take turns being the one to remind each other to be happy and love our time together. We try to find something to keep us busy so we don't think too much about that drop-off that is coming up. It makes the long drive to drop-off much easier when we have all dealt with our emotions before we leave home.

Last week the sadness began to creep in and the "I'm really, really, really going to miss you" lines started being spoken. Hugs were getting a little more desperate and smiles were turning upside down. But we had a little meeting of the hearts, sitting on the kitchen counter and reminded ourselves that we don't want to be sad when we're together, we want to make the best of every moment we have. And it worked. It always does and thank goodness we found this little strategy together and it works so well for our family. It's good to know we'll all be there for each other to pick up sagging spirits and love our time together.