On families.

It occurred to Abby and me as we took a walk this morning that this summer will mark 4 years that she's lived with us.  Four years of growing up. Four years of changes. Four years of being here morning, noon, and night.  Of being sick, of celebrating birthdays, of Christmas mornings and Valentine's Days, of first and last days of school.

Holy crap.  Four years.

When she came that summer, she literally had just the clothes on her back.  I think that's where a lot of her inability to let anything go comes from (when we moved last year, we found boxes of notebooks and school work and scraps of paper - for as much stuff that could legitimately be saved, there was double that amount that just needed to be thrown away.  And getting her to do that was like pulling teeth.  She had a justification for saving every scrap of paper, every test she'd ever taken, every shirt she'd worn.).

Slowly her Kansas City room with her Kansas City clothes and her Kansas City toys started being referred to just as her room, her clothes, her toys.  It still took months for her to settle in.  And it took three times as long for her to stop asking every day if we could get any of her clothes and toys from her Illinois house.  The day I realized that she'd stopped asking I was happy that she seemed to have adjusted to living with us, but so sad that she'd obviously realized that all of her "other stuff" was a lost cause and she'd likely never see it again.  I still allow her to justify saving some of the most ridiculous items because I know, I just know, how much her 8-year-old heart hurt to leave all of her worldly possessions behind. Even so, it took years for her to realize that this was permanent and, although it felt like her living arrangements had changed literally in a day, this time we would make sure that she wasn't going to be uprooted over night.  She had to learn to trust us when we told her that she wasn't going anywhere, that her home was with us and that we would always take care of her and that we would never lie to her.

Earning that trust was a hard fought battle, though.

It took years for me to learn the dance of mothering a girl who already had mother-issues.  The stress and the tensions that arose that summer, and the fall and winter after, not only took a toll on the relationship that Uriah and I had, but also suddenly meant that Abby and I had to figure out a whole new relationship dynamic governed by a new set of step-mother/daughter boundaries.  It came sort of as a shock to me, the realization that I made a really good, fun every-other-weekend parent, but struggled with being the full-time parent.  Learning to be a step-mom to a full-time child is loads more difficult and takes a different amount of time and energy.  And boy was it a lonely row to hoe.  I didn't have any friends at the time who had step-children, and having never been a step-child myself, I had to figure this new world out on my own.  I found myself missing the sense of relief on Sunday night when the house was suddenly quiet, the toys were put away for another two weeks and I could go back to being what I thought of as "my other life."  My new life was suddenly someone who had a step-daughter.  My new life was someone who made sure homework was done, clothes were washed and dinner was made nightly.

I'd gained a daughter, yes, but this was a child who'd been trained for many months, probably even years, not to like us.  Even before she came to live with us, when she was still an every-other-weekend kid, she was at odds with herself and with us because she had a good time when she spent her weekends in Kansas City, but she wasn't supposed to have a good time.  She'd probably trained herself to live a dual life - her Kansas City life and her Illionis life - and never the two would cross.  After she was living with us, weekends weren't special visits anymore and suddenly we were all thrust into real life, day in and day out.  So not only did we have to change her ideas about living with us and being okay with having a good time, we also had to balance the not-so-good times and learn that real life wasn't going to be one long super-fun-weekend visit and that, additionally, it was absolutely okay to miss her Illinois life, too. While she struggled with settling into her new and permanent life in Kansas City, the difficulties in doing even simple things, like calling Uriah Dad or re-doing homework that had been done sloppily, became battles of epic proportions with roots that went deeper than just re-doing homework or calling her Dad, Dad.  Every problem required so much digging to figure out what the issue really was; most days, and especially the days that were filled with a tug-or-war of the wills, I fell into bed utterly exhausted.

I spent years being constantly tired and wondering what would set the next land mine off.

It is still a challenge, but 4 years later, the challenges are different and the land mines are much fewer and farther in between.  I think we're at a point now where the challenges that we deal with on a daily basis are what any other family deals with: school pressures and friend drama and the constant ebb and flow of wanting more responsibility and having too much responsibly.  We're past the challenges of building a family from scratch with a reluctant girl.

Nearly 4 years later, we're finally just a family.