A Little Piece of my Heart

Last weekend we moved our daughter, Sloan, to North Carolina so she can start her job as a special education teacher.  This is the photo she posted with her boyfriend, Joey, and her car packed to the roof.  Our car was just ahead of her and also packed just as full.

I've been saying all along, that this was the day I was dreading for years - ever since she went away to college and made it abundantly clear that she would not be living in Michigan when she finished. Or if she did, it would have to be somewhere a whole lot cooler than our little town.

Secretly I was hoping she would go off to Michigan State University and fall in love with some fellow Michigander who had every intention of staying in-state. But, no! She had to go fall for some guy who lives in North Carolina, who really had no interest in leaving his state. (It helps a little that he's a really good guy.) So, off she went to NC this spring for job interviews and she got the first one she interviewed with! She needed a roommate, and found one through her Young Life channels - and it was someone who was already down there, so the roommate did all the hard work of finding an apartment.  Everything just seemed to fall easily into place.  Even the mattress store, where we needed to buy her a new bed, was simply across the road from her apartment complex and we didn't have to go driving up and down the highway with a mattress strapped to the top of the car.

I'm a big believer in signs, and maybe because all of this fell so easily into place, it really was meant to be. I'm trying hard to reconcile that with my feelings of losing my daughter to a state that's 14 hours away! And now North Carolina holds a little piece of my heart.