the finality and the finiteness

Today is M's last day at preschool. It's all part of the plan, the slow descent, the stripping of the safety net and it gives me pause. It's one more retreat, one of the last vestiges of connectivity to this place. She's only been going two days a week, we'd done this purposely so there was a transition for she and J from full time work to non-stop stay-at-home-dom, but tomorrow is it. So we wanted to mark the day by bringing something special for her friends to share and I spent time after work carefully picking it all out.

When I got home and showed M she told me immediately and not very nicely that it wasn't what she wanted and she wasn't going to have any and for some reason it broke me, I sank to the floor in the kitchen, bags scattered about as she stomped from the room.

I started crying then, a quiet sort of stoic little cry if there is such a thing and if not I feel the need to paint it as such, the romanticizing of it feels easier somehow. So I'm crying, not from the shitty attitude but mostly from the finality and the finiteness, I'm just a girl on a kitchen floor trying to figure it all out. Moving to a foreign place and leaving all things familiar and even all the things I rail against can lift and rattle all at once and sometimes the nakedness is powerful and other times I want to hide. We often talk about feeling like we are stepping into the abyss and sometimes I find myself having moments of weakness, of wishing we were already there and the journey was ironed out neat as a pin because getting dirty is good but it's dirty all the same.

And mostly, it's mostly that I fancy myself to be braver than I sometimes think I am.