Dreamers know that which was lost can be found again

It's been a lot of work raising Rachel lately.  And it has bothered me a lot.

We have always been so close.  I wondered, along with Sam, how I would ever be able to live without her under my roof.  How would I manage not seeing her for long stretches of time?  How could I be me without our witty banter, our nightly meals, our interactions?

And then she turned 17.

She had spent a few months at the end of last school year living with her father, which did absolutely nothing for her disposition.  She came back to us angry and mean.  She was snappish.  And suddenly, I didn't worry about surviving without her all all.  Mostly, I wondered how I was going to survive with her.  The month until graduation were many.  Shoot, the school year hadn't even started yet.

I considered what other parents had said, that the teen years were designed so that we wouldn't miss our kids so much when they moved out and moved on with their lives.  It was all beginning to make sense.  Still, I longed to get back to where we had been, the relationship we used to have.  It seemed impossible to bridge that gap.

Love her through it.

That has always been my answer to everything.  Love.  I cook with love.  I clean with love.  I write with love.  I raise my children with love.

Over the past few months, I have found a calm that is proving to be unshakable.  I have decided to smile and be happy.  I have chosen to let things go.

It seems to be working.

Rachel isn't quite so disagreeable.  The end is in sight.  She is graduating early from high school, in January instead of in June.  She will be leaving and going to college.

And just the other morning, she turned to speak to me and the first thing I noticed was her necklace.  I had struggled to buy her a tree of life necklace with raw emerald leaves all over the branches for her 16th birthday from Etsy.  To make it an even more memorable experience, I had created a scavenger hunt for her to find it that had her all over the neighborhood unscrambling these rhyming clues.  And then, a few months later, she had lost it and I was crushed.

me: Your necklace.

Rachel: Yeah, we found it when we were moving stuff out of dad's.

me: So it's back.

And it wasn't just the necklace I was talking about.  The longer she's home, the more she becomes the Rachel I know and love.  (Because loving someone isn't always the same as liking someone...)

Sometimes, that which was lost can be found.