XS went to school for all of three hours and ten minutes today. By the time I picked her up, just before 11 this morning, she was done with her year in American high school. I expected her to be bouncy and triumphant. Instead her shoulders slumped, and she admitted to being close to tears repeatedly while she told everyone goodbye. We got home, and sat across from each other in the living room. She looked at me and asked dramatically, why aren't you upset too? Without going into the details of resting bitch face, or the side effects of Botox for migraine, I postulated that maybe I'd gone through this sort of thing so often that it didn't occur to me to be alarmed. She didn't seem convinced, as I had never done a year abroad by myself in a foreign country when I was 17, but I assured her that I have had to move away from peer groups, good jobs, and home towns more times than she could imagine. I'm not great at keeping in touch with everyone I've left or who has left me, from being a child of an air force family, a young person who went to college out of state, and a matriarch of my very own air force family. These partings are indeed hard, and I am not the person to downplay the very real emotions that XS is feeling. I just can't overreact to it like I've never seen this before. She should take comfort that her year abroad came during an age of such spectacular technology that staying in touch will be ridiculously easy compared to how it would have been when I was 17. If she doesn't share photos, calls, and video chats with her buddies from this year, to grow old together even from great distance, that will be no one's failings but their own.
As we all came down from the drama of the last day of school, and stress started to fall out of our pores, hard core relaxing was the order of the day. I only ("only") had a 45 minute nap, but two trips to the hot tub. XS napped twice, and spent hours and hours with her new best friend from Finland (one of the other exchange students in town -- I may get to meet a third one this weekend). The Mr took a recovery day from his trip to take care of our rental house out of state, but still managed to work in the yard and get way more done than we girls did. The cats got to play outside in the sun, but were lured back inside with giant stalks of the fresh catnip that threatens to take over the raised bed where I had been growing strawberries and kitchen sage. Within a few minutes, my living room carpet looked like all those turn of the 20th century paintings they used to make romanticizing opium dens. I kind of expect the next several days to follow in this vein.
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