Hi Certai Hope,
This part of your post fueled my fears about how my daughter feels about me and what could be ahead:
I've enjoyed being 1,000 miles away from my parents for the past 5 years and generally prefer not to dig too deeply into the feelings I might have (or not have) for them. In my mid-40's also, it seems this season of breaking away has been a sort of delayed reaction with me... a late bloomer, I guess. They write each and every week and have done so for the past 5 years. Enclosed in their envelope, my Dad will put the church bulletin from that Sunday's service and a collection of little jokes (some of them rather raunchy) that he wants to share with us here My mother encloses a dollar for each of the kids who are still here at home, paper-clipped to her little letter in which she's written her usual stoic/ martyr/ perfectionist/phony-sounding comments which never really manage to communicate much. Until recently, I'd let those weekly mailings pile up, unopened, for 6-8 weeks without even opening them. Avoidance seems to be my strong suit I want to honor my parents, so I'm hesitant to even say what I really think or use too many adjectives in describing their behavior. I'm afraid that if I open those floodgates, it could get messy, so usually I try to just keep it factual.
I'm afraid my D feels the same way about me, more or less.
Hops
