I just got home from a PTO budget meeting and I am smiling…  Why, you may ask, would I be smiling after a budget meeting?  Because it was so good to see the ladies (and one gentleman) again after a long summer of working and scheduling my children’s lives.  I am looking forward for school to start in a couple of weeks for several reasons – (1)  my kids HAVE GOT to get out of this house, (2) it is much simpler to make a work schedule when I know where they are 5 days a week from 8:30-3:30, and (3) I get to see all of the parents that I have become friends with since The Bug started Pre-School.

There were times during the past 20 months that I thought I should move home.  Go back to my parents’, lick my wounds, and start over again.  But then I didn’t want to have to move the kids away from their home, from their friends, from their school – I was there, I did that when I was a teenager and it was HARD on me.  But I lived and my kids would, too, if I moved them.

But the thing that has held me here are the bonds that I have made since The Bug was born.  I have finally found a place where I fit in, where I belong.  I’m not the “new girl” or the outsider.  I have good friends that I have known since college, high school and even elementary school, but HERE is where I feel welcome.  It is my home.

School starts soon and with it will be the mayhem of morning drop-offs, afternoon pick-ups, homework, reports, scout meetings, instrument lessons and on and on.  But it also means seeing my friends on a daily basis, catching up on the playground, working a library shift and seeing the smile on my kid’s face when s/he sees me at school, talking with the teachers and secretaries.  I will feel complete again…  as complete as I can be right now.

Every day I am a little better and as the Beatles said, I get by with a little help from my friends.