the above screen shot shows a web page i look at nearly every day. it is part of a collection of webpages i use to motivate and remind me of things important to me. i originally made the above page to look at before leaving the office to help me shift from work mode to family mode. when i first made it, the day count in red had thousands of days. now it has hundreds of days, and barely so.

we all knew this day was coming. and i was, i am, hoping that when it arrives, i'll be ready. all that know bella know she is ready to strike out on her own. hell, she might have been ready a year ago. but that's what we want, no? better to be ready a year early and chomping at the bit than a year late and fodder for the world-away-from-home.

my father-in-law always said that if your kids are old enough to leave home and don't want to leave home, you're doing something wrong. that is one of those curious sayings that i totally get and totally question at the same time. i think bella holds a similar schizophrenia about it. when the college-conversation began, bella said she would only go to schools that were within twenty minutes of the house. while that may seem overly limiting we had six to choose from (and we don't live in boston). when we asked why she placed this limitation on it, she said it was because she didn't want to miss sunday dinners with the family. before marty or i could react anthony through a half-chewed mouthful of food said, "but you're not home for sunday dinners now, why do you think you will be when you're in college?" oh, out of the mouths of babes.

not only did bella want to stay close to home, she wanted to stay AT home. marty and i drew the line here strongly encouraging her to live in the dorms of whatever school she chose, because, well because that was just part of it. bella would not relent and made repeated arguments, all sound, for living at home. then bella did a week-long house-sitting job for a neighbor. she came home in the middle of the week to visit and after about twenty minutes said, "i'm going back to MY house. you're all are too noisy." after the job ended and bella returned home she said she had re-considered the whole dorm thing and thought maybe she'd like to try living on campus. i explained that life in the dorms is not like living alone in a 3,000 square foot house with a pool and your own theater system. i didn't even mention that while the four other members of her family are loud, we are collectively loud and she all on her own out-decibels us easily.

but, the late teen years do offer a natural weening period. and it goes both ways. the child separating from the parents who still want to parent and the parents pulling back from the child who is feeling done with being parented. we all know this is meant to happen but it doesn't make it any less of a pill. and just as i began to emotionally accept a world where my oldest child no longer lived under my roof, bella comes to marty and i and says she is considering taking a gap-year and working at a womens' shelter in nepal. if i were asked to come up with the exact opposite of living in a dorm eight miles from the house, a home for abused women on the other side of the world might be it.

it sounds funny telling someone, your child or not, that there are reasons to not go help and educate women trying to recover from horrific abuse and torture. there's no way to say those sorts of things and not have it sound wrong leaving your mouth. there's that and the fact that marty and i are able to admit that this new plan is way more in alignment with bella's likely future than is any university setting, be it near or far from our sunday dinner table. it all may be as simple as accepting that now i just have to make new sorts of counters that track things like the number of days until my daughter is back on the same continent as me. on the positive side, i've got some experience at making day-counters.

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a quick note about the picture on the lower half of the web page above. it was taken by Slava Veder in 1973 and is titled Burst of Joy. it shows the return of an american pilot who was held prisoner for five years during the vietnam war. when you look at the age of the children charging towards him, for some of them he missed half of their lives and for the older ones, pivotal moments of their life. it is by my estimation the most remarkable image of unadulerated bliss and family love that has ever been taken. it is rare for me to gaze at this image and not find myself moved. a large print of it hangs in my home office and serves as a reminder to me of how fortunate i am, unlike Lt. Col. Robert Stirm above, to see my children everyday AND it works to help me never take a single one of those days for granted.

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lastly, i forgot that a live-version of the day-counter has lived over here for the last few years. in the lower text it states that when that page went live in 2012, it read 2,601 days.