Day 15 Messenger is a Godsend!

Facebook Messenger is a lifeline when you have a daughter living across the ocean.

When we began this journey of living in Europe for an entire second career (after a military one), the kids were small. The years passed and they grew up as we moved from Belgium to the South of France, to the Netherlands and then to Italy. But we no sooner got to Italy and, 2 weeks later, one flew out of the nest all the way across the ocean to Pennsylvania for college. I flew across the ocean with her but returned empty armed and very sad on that big airplane.

Parenting and Adulting is hard. It's really, really hard. Some days it's all about kissing a scraped knee and the next day they are graduating from high school and ready to leap into the great unknown.

This morning, as I was getting ready to drive to work, my iPad dinged with a Messenger notification. It was our girl who lives in the big city of New York. Without this connection, I don't know how it would even be bearable. I know the whole reason we work so hard at parenting is to prepare our kids for adulthood and we want them to be self sufficient. I also know that our daughter is self sufficient and doing a great job of surviving in the big city.

I think though I'd like to live like they did in years past where families lived close to one another and were connected and always spent time together. Maybe I feel this way because the majority of my adult life I've lived far away from our families and our hometown. 

Moving from State to State and Country to Country can take a toll on you. Our lives are enriched by the variety of traditions and new things we learn about in each place but we lack strong, deep roots that support us in the hard times.

I'm really, really looking forward to the day when we all live at least on the same continent and I can jump into a car or onto a plane and get to my dear loved ones in a reasonable amount of time!

Meanwhile, I'll depend on Messenger and Skype and be glad for all of the technology we have at our fingertips where our loved ones can be there on our phone or computer screens and we can see them when we talk to them! 

I can only imagine how hard it was on my own mother when I said "I do" and walked back down the aisle with my military man. She wasn't part of the technology generation having been born in 1921 and we only had the landline telephones to connect us and snail mail. Boy, have times changed! Thank Goodness!