The road to transition has taken a hold on me this week. As this journey takes us farther down the road and closer to the day my daughter turns 22 I become more and more fearful. Afraid of the unknown. Afraid of not knowing what this next destination will hold for her and us as a family.
Transition, I have discovered, is not an easy thing. It’s like traveling to an unfamiliar country that you thought you knew about but once you got there you were totally lost. As our daughter got closer to turning 22 and aging out of public school we heard more and more about transition. It was always however just a word, it was never a reality.
And here we are today facing that reality. A reality for me but not yet for her. She still has no idea of what lies ahead. We are now at the point of the process of finalizing where her destination will be. Getting to this point has not been easy. As it becomes more final it gets more scary. We know the destination but little else. How she is going to get there, how long she’ll stay and what she’ll do when she’s there still has to be figured out. After all of that is done we then have to explain it to her.
Just how does one explain to their child that functions on all that is predictable that their world is about to change? This perhaps is what frightens me the most. Her world is about to be rocked and she won’t understand it until she actually goes through it. As a mother this is a hard thing to deal with.
I’m bracing myself for the rough road ahead. There is no doubt in my mind that eventually she’ll do fine and this transition will just be one more obstacle that we have made it past. Getting to that point however is going to be awful.
The transition process has been and continues to be an unsettling time along our journey with our daughter. The process forces us to keep moving ahead even though we are unprepared. Knowing that she is going to have to make an incredibly hard transition haunts me each and every day. Thoughts of not knowing where and when we’ll be able to stop and rest easy again have taken hold of me.
Princesses and Predictability 