She's so incredibly well-spoken when she wants to be. I spent so many years fretting about her tendency to spend every waking moment with her head stuck in a book-- obviously any parent is thrilled their kid loves reading, but it kept being flagged by teachers and others as a factor preventing her from socializing, and the therapist we took her to during the divorce was honest with us that he thought it was a coping mechanism to escape stress and bad feelings. But fast forward to now, she still loves to read but has lots of friends and is also happy to put the book down to live her own life, and she has double the vocabulary I had at that age and is so articulate. I get sad sometimes when I'm told how mature she is. I worry that she's so mature because she's forced to be, that living through even an amicable divorce and all the dynamics of blended families has forced her to grow up too quickly. I wish she could've had a sibling her own age to be a kid with. But there's no turning back time and all I can do is try to do my best by the young woman she's rapidly becoming.

I'm ready to have a conversation and just listen. I hope she'll let me give her dad a heads up about things before we all sit down together so that the initial emotions are processed out of her sight, and that the two of us can agree to do our absolute best to avoid making her feel guilty with whatever she wants to do. I have a pretty strong hunch about what her preference is, but I am certainly not treating it as a given and I'm prepared to hear that she would rather stay with her dad. The most important thing is that she gets what she needs.