Michelle,

Since we know one another IRL, I will ask you to recall some of our conversations about my kids and step-kids, when Vee was still a summer visitor in your life.

What you are experiencing now, it's not too different from the experience of custodial parents re: required visitation, or step-parents.

What we have learned is that the main thing to work on during the child's absence is one's own issues about boundaries, and issues about however one was parented, so that when the child returns, one can get back to focusing on what is best for the child, whether it feels good to oneself or not. The grief and worry, one offers up in whatever way one finds useful, for one's own continuing development.

Otherwise one begins to function according to what one feels one needs for oneself, even though one starts out knowing that parenting is never about that. (If only intention could be as reliable as an Expedia map.) But there is a slippery slope, especially in parenting a child who is legally and morally not your own, where intention becomes blurred with intolerable discomfort, and the absences provide a powerful reminder of how to work on that side of things. In the time of absence you will experience fresh views of it all that you could not otherwise see at all, including deep truths about your relationship with the child; it helps to welcome the reflection, if not the cause of it.

The BEST thing about these visitation times is that the more they happen, the less the child will need to make up for lost time, and all the hunger for bonding, with the absent parent later. We sowed that when the kids were preteens and reaped it as they got older and more rebellious (I mean "independent"!).

Knowing the absent parent, as they really are, makes for a much stronger child, later. One of ours has chosen, for practial as well as developmental reasons, to live in her mother's home this last year or so. She has learned everything she wished she had known and could not know without the extended, day in/day out time together. She's had what she calls "enough," and is smart enough to know the difference between the healthier model she had from us, and the co-dependent "friendship" her mother seems to "need."

Kids tend to run FROM need, and run TO love, when both options are available.


Another hard phase lies before you, and if you think it is hard now, it is much harder than this one. And that is, no matter how unhealthy the absent parents or the relationships with them, kids tend to need to explore that side of themselves (be it, act it out, try it on), as they leave the nest and make their own. You can do everything for them, and then see them go off in exatly the "wrong" direction you thought you had saved them from(!), seeming to be "just like" the so-and-so whose mess you've been tending to for years!

This will bother you less if you work on the boundary thing now. Cuz really it is just a phase, and they move through it quickly when we don't freak out, and then they get back to being the wonderful person YOU raised.

I feel for ya, but ya gotta learn all this on your own, and I know you know that.

~Susan