Em’s the shit.. oh, and she’s home.
So, obviously, there's no "favoritism" with parenting (other than of the daily kind whereby on a given day one of them just makes life so cool that you HAVE to make them the favorite for the day). Well, not any that any parent will admit to. However -- and, believe me, my mother can and will bear witness to this -- there really is something so very special about the "baby" in the family (yes, I know that's a terrible way to refer to a 19 year old, and that I'll probably rot in a special hell just for that, but I'm 32 and my mom still does it.. not that I'm aspiring to become my mother.. hm). Therefore, I feel justified writing about her when I've never taken the time to write about any of the kids here (wow, I'm a shit parent! yay!). But, I digress..
Emily FINALLY came back from the UK about a month ago, after more than a year's absence. This was, perhaps, the most anticipated moment of our collective life as a family EVER. Honestly, the buzz around the house built up for those last few weeks 'til you could barely get through it to get in the door. Personally, I was nervous. You just never know what you're going to get when someone's been gone for a year. Obviously, when it's one of your kids, you know they'll be the same person you love, but the accumulated little differences of a year can be surprisingly jarring -- particularly, or possibly mostly, in one's imagination. I was sure there'd be some sort of.. I don't know. Not exactly awkwardness, but something funny while she and we felt our way around and found a way to put her back in our lives, and vice versa.. Then I drove the airport, waited in the car park for Kerri to retrieve her, saw her, and the next thing I knew I was out of the car running across that car park like a freak, and bear hugging her with tears coming down my face. Seriously. Your kids will make you do scary shit. Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, she turns out to be roughly the same "little girl" she's always been.. Just much more well-travelled.
I'm so happy she's back. Besides the obvious "having the baby back home" stuff, there's all sorts of Emily stuff too. She frequently stays out all night and winds up with a friend or three crashing all over her bedroom, which is strangely endearing, for instance. There's practical stuff, as in the fact that she's the only one of the three kids who seems to have any natural acumen for cleanliness, which appears to have been heightened by her time sharing a house with strangers.
It's not only Kerri and I who are happy to have her back. One thing about all three of our kids is that they're social butterflies on a scale that Kerri and I could never imagine ourselves. I like this. I'm glad that in the relatively short time I've been with the kids I didn't manage to turn them into anti-social geek hermits like me. In Em's case, it seems as though half the city was anxiously awaiting her return. Case in point: she arrived home on a Saturday, and by Thursday she had started her new full-time job -- selling computers, yeah baby -- in the city with some friends of hers.
There's so much I could write about how happy I am to have her home. Kerri and I regularly relate to each other how we can't seem to keep our hands off her. It's as though we need to keep reassuring ourselves of her physical presence. Hug, hug, fix collar as convenient excuse, hug, kiss on the cheek when she leaves the house, hug hug hug hug hug. It's disgusting. I'm sure it will wear off, but until then, she handles it awfully well. Maybe we'll stop when we reach her threshold and starts punching us in defense.
