Today we spent the afternoon in a way that has become sadly familiar to us. Another farewell party.
In our little corner of the world, friends depart fairly frequently. To new duty stations or posts in far flung places. In a way, we've become accustomed to it. In a very small way. Saying good-bye to loved ones is never easy. Each of us has developed our own coping mechanisms. Or, at least, I thought we had. These past few years, the good-byes have been more poignant and more difficult. My boys have started making more English friends and fewer American friends because the rotating door of friendship was just becoming too tough. The year that six of the seven boys in my eldest's scout den moved away was the last for him. He just didn't have it in him to "make friends with someone who was just going to leave again."
We have lived overseas for 10 years now. And in that time, I have made some truly wonderful friendships. We've raised our babies together, navigated foreign bureaucracies, broken any manner of bread together and held each other's hands in alien hospitals. These are my friends for life. The friends I keep up with on Facebook and email with an occasional phonecall thrown in. But for my kids, FB friends cannot camp out in the back garden or catch a ball or get the rebound. And while they might still get your jokes, the rough and tumble goofiness of adolescent boys is lost on a computer screen.
And tonight, we're feeling all the old losses with the new. Tomorrow we will put a brave face on and we will cheerfully welcome the new friends headed our way this spring. But tonight, our hearts are a bit sore and farewell seems like an awfully long time...
