When I mentioned to my vegetarian daughter (a vegan wannabe), just moments ago, that I had forgotten to buy eggs at the store she said “Good, I don’t want you to eat eggs anyway. Eggs are like abortion, except you eat them.”

Oh the mind of a 13 year old, she knows it all but is still innocent. And with that simple comment she solved the issue of what I should eat for dinner. Nothing! I’ve lost my appetite, thank you.

I’m just back from a quick, last-minute trip to Colorado. It cost and arm and a leg. And has delayed everything I was already behind on from getting finished. But it was a needed trip.

My daughter has made the decision, with my and her dad’s support, that now is the time to return to the US to live. Originally we all planned that she would move back there next school year. But various things have come to a head and now is the proper time.

I have mixed feelings. First and foremost I’m happy for her because we’ve found an excellent school for her there and I truly believe that she will be happier there than she could be in the bilingual school she was attending here.

She will be living with her dad, his wife and her half sister. So she will be with family. And she will live in the town she was born in, so it’s truly home for her. And she will be able to ride her bike and/or the bus to school, which she could never safely do here. (And, dare I say it, that town has more going on in it than Cancun will ever have.) So there is a lot of good inherent in the situation for her.

But I will miss her like crazy. And she’s not happy about being away from me either.

Much of my energy for the last 4 years, since coming here, was invested in making her happy and comfortable here. And now it seems that I didn’t manage to accomplish that, at least not all the way. But I did manage to become exhausted trying.

And this change makes me wonder how invested I really, truly am in being here at all. Should I drop everything and go try to find a job there just to be near her? How much of this life would I miss? Is she going to be ok without me? Is her father going to teach her to be like HIM? Ack! There are just too many things to worry about.

What I will probably do is wait and see. I’ve got a US phone line in the house. She’s got a cell phone. It’s a local call for her to call me. So I guess I will just impress on her that she needs to call me all the time and keep me up to date on her life. But yuck and a half, we are not made to be apart from our kids.