A Stressful Year

I tend to think of years sort of in School Years so sort of August to August with the summer as the borderline between years. There is the actual year change on January 1st every year but I sort of find that very arbitrary and not as meaningful as what a school year does to a family whether that be grade school, Middle School(junior high), or High School or even college. So, since I have been raising kids non-stop since I was 26 and I'm now 66 I have been raising children (one or more under age 18 since then continuously until now so (40 years ongoing). However, my youngest now is going off to college and my oldest biological child is going to make me a grandfather in the next month. So, that should be interesting.

So, the first stressful thing was that my wife and I knew our youngest was going off to college in another state in the fall and graduating high school soon now.

Then the second stressful thing is my wife realized she couldn't take the pain every day from her knee and after several months finally realized she had to get a knee replacement so she went to one of the best specialists on the west coast for that. So that will be at the end of next month.

The third stressful thing is my oldest biological son is having a child on June 5th because of the age of the mother being almost 40. And they live far away from us. Several thousand miles. So, that is kind of stressful not being there for that because my wife needs to have a knee replacement around then too. So, we will have to visit when she recovers and hopefully Before my youngest goes off to college.

So, this has been even more stressful than I realized until this weekend. Here is how I realized how stressful all this has been. Everyone left for southern California and instead of feeling lonely I'm amazingly relieved. No one is yelling at me because she is in pain or because she is stressed out trying to graduate and go away to college. No one is here to make my life difficult in any way but me and my two dogs. This has been incredibly blissful in a way I couldn't have imagined a year ago.

Hopefully, my wife's old optimistic, happy and effervescent and extremely intelligent personality will return soon after her knee replacement surgery. I'm very hopeful of that. As for my 18 year old. "What can I say?" She's 18 and thinks she knows everything but doesn't really yet but won't listen to me or her mother about that yet. So, give her about 2 or 3 years and she will start to figure all that out.