Some days it hurts to be a parent

Today we got the sad news that we had been dreading. Our dear dog of nearly twelve years has inoperable cancer. The vet has no precise guess as to how long she'll be with us. Could be a matter of a month or two...could be six months. No idea. Explaining it to our sons and cradling them while we all cried together was as hard as knowing I was going to be losing my best four-footed furry friend. Daisy has always been a fixture in their lives and they keep asking for her to get better. I am not sure if the long slow goodbye is the best, but it will give me the chance to make up for the past several years of giving priority to my two-legged kids over my four-legged one. Daisy and I survived college together, trips to Hoover Dam at midnight, cross-country roadtrips, hurricanes, airplane trips, walks on the beach, Kansas thunderstorms, the adoption of my husband and of three puppies (children) to the pack. She's had an adventurous life and we've matured together. I'm going to miss her.

The other part that's breaking my heart is knowing that we'll soon need to tell the boys about Mike's upcoming deployment. The last time he left the kids were too little to understand the concept of "months". This time they know the "months of the year" song and they know exactly how long it will be. There will be questions of where? Why? Can he come home? Why can't he come home? There will be that first week or so of overwhelming sadness and sudden outbreaks of tears and "I want Daddy!". That will be replaced by an unbelievable clingy-ness, thinking that at any moment Mommy might also leave them. About a month or more into the deployment, we'll settle into a routine. Emotions will even out and the extreme attachment will slowly lessen. By the fourth month, "normal" will mean no-Mike. When he returns, it will actually take a while to readjust to a "normal" that includes him.

I am also sadden by everything Mike will miss during this upcoming year. When he comes home, Sean will most likely be reading and have an even more independently defined personality and interest list. Matthew will have lost that wide-eyed innocence of preschool and playdates. He'll have that hardened seriousness of an elementary school student with the pressures of peers and homework. Jonathan will have learned to talk and become fully a preschool boy... not the babbling toddler. And then there will be our daughter... she will have arrived as a part of our family not even knowing there's a daddy lurking closer to her original home than here. The boys will know her personality, likes and dislikes. We will have established our own little family structure minus Mike.

Parenthood isn't all just cute homemade cards and kissing boo-boo's. Some boo-boo's are deep inside and you just can't fix them. Also, no matter how many foam bumper corners and baby gates you install, there are "hurts" that you will never be able to protect your child from. Those are the ones that hurt YOU the most.