I'm Back: Part 1

So, like I said in my last post more than 7 months ago, it has been interesting. To summarize what has happened (because frankly, I don't have the mental energy to describe events in detail and relive the emotions involved) here is a rough timeline:

• Sometime late February (soon after I turned 50; hence, the intended Camino): My daughter decides to spend her sophomore year of HS in the Philippines "to be with my grandmother (my mother). Sometime soon after that, I agree.
  
• March: We embark on a frenetic filling out of the application. The International School of Manila designates us as second to the lowest priority, since we are not expats, not already there, not foreigners. We are told that we would have to wait until May, after enrollment of current students, if there are slots for new ones. Nevertheless, we solicit teacher recommendations, e-mail grades, get my father to sign a guardianship form, comment on the uniform. My daughter fills out her part of the application, answering the question, "Why do you want to study in IS" with "I want to spend time with my lola." I tell her to supplement the truth. Headaches start to beset me in the mornings. IS classes start August 5th and if accepted, we would have to leave middle of July for placement testing. Two and a half months of preparation for staying away the whole year seem like nothing. Add to that my emotional preparation: I would have to leave my daughter after accompanying her.
• Early April: Duly impressed, the director of admissions agrees to give my daughter a slot way ahead of time. She is going.
• Mid-April: I coordinate schedules for my family and satellite members. My parents were going to visit my brother in Vancouver in June; now they have to rush home. Various planned events now have to be rescheduled or cancelled, including this Camino. Since I want to spend a few months with my daughter in the Philippines, I would not be able to join Bunny on her planned dates. After navigating the maze of travel arrangements--with an increasingly heavy heart each day--I buy tickets. Travel to Manila for my daughter and me in the summer, travel back to Manila in December for me, my husband, and son (my father is planning an 80th birthday party), open return sometime the next year for my daughter. At some point during all this, my son's girlfriend decides to join us in December, thereby complicating my son's schedule, but this is all worked out. My headaches intensify.
• May: I start packing. There is a service that will ship enormous boxes from the US and Canada to the Philippines via container freight, called "Door-to-door." I fill two boxes with my daughter's uniform, shoes (she wears a size 10, not your regular Filipina shoe size), cereal, mac and cheese (she's vegetarian), not-tested-on-animals deodorant, sunblock and cosmetics, contacts solution, snorkel mask (with prescription). I throw in a few gifts for the family as well, for Christmas. The guy comes to pick the boxes up, tells me they will be in Manila by mid-July. I have timed it so that they will be waiting when we get there, yet not too early in case my daughter wanted to pack something last minute, a special book or stuffed animals, for instance.

• Whenever the Chicago Lit Fest was: I walk six blocks to Lit Fest (formerly Printers Row Book Fair) to buy my daughter a hand-tooled leather diary. She likes to sketch. Maybe she'll write too. I put it in a box in my bedroom for things to pack in my suitcase for the trip. I realize that the cover is made of animal hide, and hope she is so bedazzled by the design (checkerboard and dragon--she draws both obsessively, it's perfect!) she doesn't notice.
  

I would like to stop here. We're getting to the climax of this narration and, as I feared, I'm re-experiencing my emotions a little too vividly. There are a lot more details that I had planned on writing, but I guess that's what a purge is: uncontrolled dispensing. I will write more tomorrow or very soon because I have a deadline, which is Sept 22nd. You'll know why soon.

Thanks for reading.
Almira