Thanks you to you all for your sympathy and understanding hearts in the loss of my daughter.

Searcher, you are so right - about degrees of grief AND about the 30 degrees below. I must say, we are grateful for a mild winter this year. we broke a record by not having one day below zero in the month of january! now it is getting cold, though, so guess i'll snuggle in for a few days.

on the issue of our children moving away, maybe i can shed some light on the topic from the perspective of "the kid who moved away".....

when i married in 1977 i moved to my husband's home 350 miles away from my own parents and siblings. 30 years ago, that distance seemed like lightyears and i felt like i'd been dropped on another planet. my four sib's all stayed closer to home.

i did get home a few times before baby #1 came along, but by the time i had 3 it became a pretty tough trip. we had a dairy farm and that situation didn't allow dh to travel so it was just me with the three to go see my family. even when my oldest was a baby and until the youngest graduated, i made that trip for about a week each summer because i wanted to be sure my kids knew my family.

now, 30 years after i moved here, i can assure you that my sorrow is equal or greater to that of my parents for my absence. mom and dad were great about coming out here a couple times a year until dad could no longer travel. one of my sisters made it a point to come for summer visits until the last 10 years. the others made only rare trips.

i am hurt because:

1. my kids never spent even one christmas with my family. every year i put up with dh's neurotic family and had some pretty miserable holidays while my family was having a great time together. dh always said i should take the kids and go for a christmas but it wouldn't have been good for them without him. after my daughter died, no way would we separate for christmas. only once in all these years a sister and her family came here for christmas. now my dad has died and we all scatter, sharing our own kids with their inlaws, so those times are simply lost.

2. my siblings all think the road to my house is much, much longer than the one i travel to theirs. once my kids were grown and no longer wanted to go with me, i was able to visit mom and dad more often, but alone. in the 2 years before dad died, i made MANY trips home to make sure i would never be "the one who moved away and is never there to help" and because i genuinely wanted to be there for mom and dad.

they all seem to have lost the map to my house. i love to be with my family but in the last year or so, i have begun to feel very angry toward them for their lack of effort in coming to see me. they make plenty of longer trips just for the sake of 'getting away' but the road never seems to bring them here.

my house is clean and big and i'm a great cook. i do my best to show them a good time when they are here so i don't know what the big hold-up is. we all get along and have fun when we are together.

i certainly don't regret having married my dh, i am still very much in love with him. these 30 years have certainly been a sacrifice for me, though. i have wonderful and close friends here, but i have no one here to talk to who knows me from my growing up or who knows my family. i have no one here who i can laugh and remember school days and old times with. most of our friends are old school mates of dh. when they start to talk old days at school and who lived here and where things used to be, i just tune out. it feels lonely.

so, those of you who have kids in other regions, please also remember that they are missing you, too. they are sacrificing, too. do your best to go to them and be as familiar as possible with the twists and turns of their lives where they are. they want to share themselves with you as much as you want them home.

[ February 09, 2006, 02:10 AM: Message edited by: flipperjo ]