week on, week off

Assimilating into my new life has been a duplicitious process; I am both joyful and daunted by being a step mother. We have my husband's children every other week, and the navigation between the two has taken some adjustment. One weekI will find myself worrying with my husband over his teenager's somberness, while hesitantly accepting my other step daughter's request to assist me in my house cleaning duties (for I want to encourage to cleanliness the torrential hurricane of disorder that is her life and yet my patience is tested as have to add an hour to the cleaning schedule as an eight year old's attention is easily diverted from the toilet bowl to Miley Cyrus). I have to find time to accomplish my personal responsibilities and adjust to the noise level generated by small children and adolscents; giggling plus questions plus running stairs plus hamster plus disney channel produces a decibel to which I am not yet accomostomed. It is a gradual process. At first I use to relish the weeks without them for the ease and lessened stress. Time with my husband running on the beach, blogging, dinners with friends. And yet the challenge therein at the end of that week being the mental preparation for the impending week of difference. Louder noise, increased stress. And then when they come it is like the rushing of wind, and it is amazing the joy generated by the simplest words of an 8 year telling you that she missed you. And now the diametric opposition of weeks has settled to a paradigm of appreciation for the differences of both-the simplicity of time alone with my husband, compared to the opportunity to experience an element of parenthood while inadvertently memorizing Nicklodean's Saturday night line up. Adjusting to the contrast and diversity of life is a stressful, joyful and bittersweet process. And I will always bless the sweetest words of a small child and how they have warmed a novice yet learned heart.