All part of the package

It's official. I am a certifiable emotional wreck. As time winds down and we enter the good-bye party season, I have been pretty much in emotional denial. "Just hunker down, finish the Awana stuff, finish out the school year, one more week to make soup for the Bible Study. There is still time to pack and say good-bye." If I can just pack all the emotional stuff in a box under the Polly Pockets and the winter clothes, then I can unpack it all later when I have more time to deal with it. Sitting by the pool in Orlando seems like a pretty good time to process it all. The problem is today, the box sprung a leak and I found myself standing in the grocery store blinking back tears for absolutely no reason.

Well, there is actually a reason. One month from today we move out of this apartment to house-sit for friends before we leave Moscow entirely. The people who have come to look at the apartment have hardly looked. They stand in the living room and peer around and it dawns on me, they are going to gut the place entirely. Don't they want to look at my beautiful kitchen where I learned to love cooking? Don't they want to see our beautiful tile floors that match the tile backsplash even though they were bought at different stores, on different days, with only my memory to serve as a purchasing guide? Don't they want to see our beautiful master bath with the bamboo ceiling? How can they not love the kid's rooms with the stenciled walls and the adjoining door so they can have one huge play space with tons of room to run? We put our heart and soul into this place and it's bad enough to leave it, but to think that in a year it won't exist anymore is more than I can bear, so I stuff it all into the box labeled "Emotions: Open carefully"

And that's just the apartment. I can't even write about the friends, yet. Christopher is also a total wreck. He came home from a good-bye picnic in tears about saying good-bye to his friend, Victor. He'll still see Victor at school and scouts and we will be sure to get some fun time together as well, but for Christopher, the saying good-bye is feeling very tangible now. He hasn't stuffed his emotions in a box and so I find myself consoling him, which means consoling myself, as well. As we snuggled on the couch we talked about the pain of saying good-bye and how it's good that it hurts. If it didn't hurt, it would mean that our time in Moscow hasn't meant very much at all. Wouldn't it be pathetic if we left without any twinges of sadness at all? Life here has been good and so we embrace those tears with great gratitude. It's all part of the package and what a wonderful package it has been.