You're Cordially Invited

To My Pity Party. Whine and Cheese are now being served.

My daughter is moving home this weekend. I love her dearly and am welcoming her back with open arms. But in the last year I have unfolded the most beautiful butterfly wings that I've ever possessed and retracting them is proving a little more difficult than I imagined.

We easily talked out the roommate rules moving from the mother/daughter roles we've filled in the past. Living by the new rules will, I'm sure, pose some challenges. After all we had 24 years of perfecting the original roles.

She moved out and I moved into her space. Now I'm having to contract my space. Mind you, this house is huge. Her space offered a creative outlet - a way for me to learn decorating and what personal s-p-a-c-e was. Something that I've never had before....my own space with walls I could color however I wished.

As I took down the accents that I had pulled together in my yoga room/her room and placed them in baskets and boxes to move to a closet, I cried. It seemed such a shame to put my backpack in a closet. It was my everything for 275 miles. Putting it out, say in my bedroom or livingroom, isn't sane either. In the yoga room, it had it seemed to have a place of its own - an earned right to be visible. That room was my faith and energy to prepare for Spain. It is as hard for me to leave it as I'm sure it is for her to come back to it changed.

We'll work it out, no doubt.

Tonight, I'll take care of all the things I need to reign in, including my conflicting emotions.

Tomorrow, I'll be ready to embrace the joy of having my daughter and my grandson near me each and every day. And knowing that it is a choice to be with me and that I'm so very very loved. At the end of the day - who would really want it any differently?

After all - I really do get to have it all: the new me in the old arrangement (and it wasn't bad at all). I lose a paint job (for now) - big deal.

Pass the chevre please.