Long Live The King

Sorry to have been gone so long.  We had a family tragedy back in the US.  It is every ex-pat’s worst nightmare.  To be so far away when disaster strikes.  Here’s my advice.  Keep a strong support group back at home.  Whether it involves your home, your children, your parents, your extended family or whatever, you need to have people in place to deal with anything and everything because, here’s the sad truth, you cannot get there as soon as you would like.

I cannot describe to you the feeling you fellow Traveling Spouses will have when you get the word that something really, really bad is going on back at home and, even if you book your plane tickets within the hour, you know that you are not going to be back there for another day, at the minimum.  Thank God, I live in a small town back in the US.  Those Southern Mommas rallied around all three of my children like they were their own.  As the Secretary of State once said, “It takes a village to raise a child”.

On a lighter note, I was not aware until last week that the current trend among the younger generation is to commemorate a friends’ death by going out and getting a tattoo in their honor.  Who knew?  Two weeks ago my precious 20-year old baby boy still had the skin he was born into.

Today he has a tattoo on his back the size of a dinner plate.  Ah me.  He and all of his friends think it is the bomb.  They think it is flippin’ awesome.  What do I know?  I am just the mother who endured 16 hours of labor and many stitches to bring him into this cruel world.  I also walked five miles every day in bare feet in the snow to school, but that is another story.

So, to all of the folks back in South Carolina who did my job when I could not be there, I am forever in your debt.  Thank you, thank you for being in my village.

Rest In Peace, Reid Andrew Addy. 
http://web.me.com/jelevan/Reido/Welcome.html