Transitions

Little O and I have been living our "new" life now for a month... some days it seems like it has been so much longer than that, and then in a number of other ways it feels like the new life that it is. This is a time of transition for all of us...

My focus has been on O, and helping her to understand why she now has a new house and an old house, why she has different sets of rules depending on where she is, and why we aren't all together like we used to be. Part of the transition has involved her sleeping in my bed... interestingly, she is sleeping just fine at her dad's house, but when at the home she knows best, insists that she needs to sleep with me. So, in violation of someone's rule on best practices for parenting, I have been letting her... seems like the least I can do considering all of the upheaval in her life.

Speaking of which... as if she didn't have enough going on, she turned three and had to move to her big-girl preschool room at the daycare. Talk about adding insult to injury... I tried to talk them out of moving her, but they ended up convincing me to go along with the change because she is just too smart to stay with the little ones, and they didn't want her to miss out on moving with her friends. Hard to argue against letting her stay with her friends, especially since the alternative was to let her think they, too, were "abandoning" her. Yes, putting it that way, does hit a nerve (or two)...

Needless to say there is enough guilt throughout all of this to last me for quite some time. I literally spend so much time questioning the wisdom of every parenting decision that I make these days, that it wasn't until following her birthday party that I realized I haven't really thought about my own transition. Half-way through happy birthday I had to stop singing or I would have been in tears. I still have these moments where I question how I ended up in this life? How could I have made so many bad choices that I ended up here? That was never my plan, was it? Aren't I smarter than this?

I am not quite sure yet how to handle my own transition to the status of single, working mom. I don't have any doubt that this is the right path, but I just wish I knew how to navigate it a little better. In the meantime, I have plenty to focus on with Little O, and at some point I will figure this new life out for me, too.