I have realized one of the reasons I am so triggered lately is that there are a lot of changes going on and many of them involve partings. Surprisingly, I myself feel OK about the partings (at least on the surface that I tend to live on), but I see or perceive my daughter's reaction and have been feeling very upset, helpless, which quickly leads to hopeless, destructive. There are other factors as well, memory stuff, so it's not all there, but it's a lot.
Boo finished school last Thursday and she has been talking about missing her friends/teachers ever since. We don't know where we will be living next year and the school requires a non-refundable deposit, so we have not re-registered her. I feel sad for her, although I know she has the support system to adjust.
The girl I have watched from one month old until this coming Friday (our last day), a few weeks shy of three-years-old, is going to preschool half-time from here on out. Her parents moved and her mom has to drive too far to keep her with me and also, of course, wants her in a class with multiple kids at once as preparation for school in two years. She is Boo's very best friend. I have tried to explain that she won't be coming over every week anymore, but we will make playdates to fun places like the zoo or museum or go visit at each others' homes. This is, for both of us, a sort of loss, but also I'm just so happy to have been a safe caregiver for her all this time and for Boo to have someone who is like a part-time sister to her. It's bitter-sweet. Today, we painted handprint butterflies, because I was thinking of the amazing transformation they have gone through since Boo was 11-months-old (she'll be four in a few months) and her friend was one-month-old. They are beautiful, smart, often kind (sometimes terrors, as kids are). Though Boo knows her best friend is going to school, I think it will hit her more when she asks when her friend is coming and I have to explain that she's not.
Add, on top of this, the moving of our home. It might not be too destabilizing on her. I moved at three (of course, barely remember it except being confused about the name of the city we were moving to), again in third and fourth grades, though those were all in the same town. I never remember it being too stressful or emotional. H had to move a lot and lost friends as a result and it is a major trigger for him, though.
Last, our best friends, who are closer than family, who lived with us several months in 2010, just decided to relocate back to another state they lived for a few years before coming back out to California when they stayed with us. If the girl I watch is Boo's best friend, their little boy (two) is her second best friend. Their three kids are closer to me than my anybody except my own nephews/nieces and I know them better than one sister's children. I am the one they count on to watch them most of the time. When they had their youngest girl, still an infant, I slept over and watched the older kids. I watch them once a week and they do the same with Boo, usually.
They are major figures in Boo's life and the people I would have made her godparents if we did any such thing, as there is nobody in my or H's families I want responsible for her if something happens to me. Yesterday, at lunch, as we were talking (and it was going over Boo and the younger kids' heads), Boo said, "This is our family," listing all of us, including our friends and their three kids, before saying, "Mommy, I love my family!" It is heart-wrenching for me as a mom, though I know a lot of that is my own triggers. I also feel so much for their poor eight-year-old son, who reminds me of H a lot (from how I've heard him described as a kid), and had a really hard adjustment coming out here, and having two new siblings in the last two years.
I know that all of that change may be a little stressful, but with two parents tuning into how she feels, helping her express it, keeping up the connections as best we can, and reminding her that she is still loved by her friends even when far away, it will be OK. It's odd, I feel myself detached about my friends leaving (less so about their kids), even though they have been a huge part of my support system. I have felt myself detaching from them as I heard this might be coming. It is so practiced as to be automatic. It seems like I feel nothing, but I wonder whether I am just projecting my actual feelings about having to do that letting go thing again onto Boo and making it bigger for her than it will actually end up being. Or, whether it is me being sensitive. Or a combination of both.
About school, I know she was really upset, because I heard and saw it as I explained Summer break to her in the car. I cried as she explained being sad and validated and comforted her about it. But, it's possible that despite her friends moving away and not seeing her sister-figure as much, she will just move on with the perseverance that children seem to have. How do I know I might be overreacting? Once, one of Boo's balls rolled in front of the heater during and deflated during her nap (she was still pretty little). I started crying, because I was afraid she would miss her ball and be very sad about it. I had no attachment to the ball myself, but imagining her attachment to it and her sense of loss triggered me into severe grief.
Anyway, I seem to be stuck in this disorganized attachment hell lately that is all to do with these projections on how my daughter MIGHT feel. I will swing wildly from my own detachment/avoidance of the reality of any connection to these people at all to empathetic overdrive about my daughter's obvious attachment to them. The thing is...my upset isn't actually about these friends leaving or losing our home. It feels very disconnected and not mine and I'm sure it is some sort of emotional memory of loss, but I just can't get at it. All I can seem to do is imagine it is about Boo, when I think it is probably not. This happens to me a lot. Another friend from church just lost his mom (expected) and was talking about the services yesterday morning and I started choking and tearing up badly. If I sense someone feeling loss, it is like a weight of hopelessness on me. Almost like the only way I can connect to what it must have felt like is to see it in somebody else, somebody who is "allowed" to feel loss, someone I can grieve for, because I have no permission to do it for me...so little permission I can't even know I need to most of the time.
I don't know what I'm looking for here, just somewhere to sort out all this sadness, I guess. Sorry that was MUCH longer than intended.
