Monument Valley week 4

Today was the first day of school for all the kids, so for the first time in 23 years, I have no littles home with me during the day. They are all gone to school. By homeschooling, I did delay this day by a couple of years. Now it is the end of a phase of my life. An era. An epoch.

I’m doing all the hard things at once… Moving away from all my friends and the place I’ve lived for 44 years, graduating half my kids into adulthood, and the other half into public school.

I did not anticipate that having all my kids in school would cause me to question my usefulness as a person. But it did. Last night I suddenly felt that nothing I would do in the home going forward would be of value, and that I was no longer needed.

It is strange how I can know a thought isn’t true and yet it can have such power over me at the same time. After a bit, I realized that I could give myself permission to grieve over this ending, and went to bed feeling curiously a little better.

Then Scooter Pie #1 came to my room and said, “Mom I forgot to tell you something.” I walked him back to bed. He worried aloud that there might be monsters under his bed and he pointed to the scary, skinny shadow in the corner that made him “crash” in his brain. I told him I was pretty sure that there were only legos under his bed.

“Can you look just in case, because they are invisible during the day?”

I looked. “Look for the red eyes,” he instructed me, quavering a little.

I did not find any red-eye monsters under the bed, just Pokémon cards, but I found the source of the scary skinny shadow (it was the string of a treasure bag dangling from the windowsill)

and I found that I am still needed after all.

Today I am looking up college courses that I can take online while the rest of the family is at school. There is much of value that I can do. The end of an era is not the end of everything. And I did bring my sewing machine with me to Utah.  😉 

❤ Glow Worm