3:40 a.m.

Well the first thing you should do is go over to Carolyn's blog and read her thoughts on accepting the changes of your life.


It is funny but I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep tonight. So I sat down with a snack and started to read and there were her words - just saying the things that had woken me up in the night.


Thank you for that Carolyn.


I have also been thinking how important it was to let relationships change. 


This is really hard to do, and in fact I think it has been a theme of my life to try to keep that from happening. It is particularly hard when the relationship, from your own point of view, has been just about perfect.


I have probably spent too much time in the last couple of years trying to hold on to times in my life that were very happy but leaving my life. I think for example of that terrific feeling I had when I put three kids to bed and knew they were completely content with their lives and their home and I could head off to the sewing room for some time by myself with the same kind of peace in my heart. A lot of times I just wanted that back.


But lately I have been accepting that relationships just change and you have to let them. This takes some effort when the person who has initiated that change is not you. It has taken me some time to come to terms with my middle son leaving not just home but this country too, and that the kid who talked my ear off and shared everything is going to be a visitor, not at home, where I am anymore.


But the funny thing is that the more I have accepted the changes in our relationship the more it feels like it did between the two of us again.


I have also just realized that there is change too in the relationship with my husband. In our partnership I have also been the one who did the talking, had the schemes, and asked for support. My husband has been the anchor man - the one who fixed things for everyone and provided the kind of steady backup that we all needed.


With him off to work in the US this year all that has changed. Now he is the one with the stories, and the buck has been stopping with me for all the things that have to happen to make a household work.  In some ways it is making me feel like a single mother again and that's not a feeling that makes me particularly happy.


But I recognize that this situation is temporary, but more significantly, that it is just his turn to be the one with the adventures for a bit and he really deserves this, after all he has done for everyone else for so long. So it's my turn to do some adjusting, to be the anchor man.


I suspect, no I know, that as I get older that life is not going to get more settled as much as require me to experience many changes, including in my relationships, even the ones that were just the way I wanted them.


As this unfolds I have to say that I am just so glad I have my sewing. That is one relationship that is constant for me and has been my whole life and because of that probably makes all the other transitions just that much easier.