farewell

 i slept alright, i guess. aside from a couple of nightmares, and the terrifying thought that if something happened to my mom i'd have to make a choice between sorting out her affairs and not leaving israel for a country with an unreasonably high risk of bad things happening.

this morning was a bit of a mess, largely trying to figure out what to do about mr smear's therapy sessions and summer camp activities for the next few weeks.

my mom and i walked to the bank to move some money around, and picked up coffee and onion bagel to share (i've never seen anyone split a bagel in two so precisely with their hands before) before heading home to prepare for her flight.

we took the train to the airport, and managed to get her through the check-in process just as i needed to join a zoom meeting for work - the first ten minutes of which i spent frustratedly trying to get zoom to connect to my bluetooth headphones.

it was a long meeting, and while i'm glad i was understood i was embarrassed by my inability to communicate my thoughts clearly, and frustrated by a general sense of the meeting being about the wrong stuff.

and that it took exactly enough time to prevent me from being able to spend time with my mother during her last hour in tel aviv.

we sent her off, and made our way to the train, and returned back home, and the rest of the afternoon was relatively peaceful and easy. i've got one book left in the asterix omnibus we bought for mr smear, the comics are just as great as i remembered and they've really aged well.

but a little too quiet without my mom. mr smear's really sad she's left.

...

after dinner, we sat mr smear down and had a very big conversation about gd's history that was triggered by a weird thing he said the other day. there's no right time to tell a child that kind of thing, but there's definitely a wrong time (like when they've found stuff out for themselves, or worse - the hard way). i think it went as well as could be expected, but gd's clearly anxious that it was the wrong thing to do.

i guess we'll find out as we go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

...

tomorrow's back to work, after taking mr smear to his therapy session, and then managing the "handylady" who's coming to fix our curtain rail(s).

i really, really hope i manage to sleep tonight.