Closing Up Shop

This was a hard week for me, one I've been preparing for since last fall, when I first told my precious clients that I would be moving. I knew it wasn't practical to continue working with them until the moment we actually left, and along with changes in childcare and other variables, it seemed like the end of the March was the right time to say goodbye.

And it has been goodbye that we have dreaded and processed and dreaded some more, but finally had to say this week. It was heart-wrenching for me - I really genuinely love these people who so entrust their hearts and lives to me so we can try to make sense together of their selves and their circumstances and help them to grow. I know it was more than heart-wrenching for them. To them I have been mother and sister and confidante and truth-teller and friend.

We will keep in touch, I'm know, but not in the way that they need most. They need the safety they have known in relationship with me, and instead they are looking at starting over, after years of work with me, with someone they don't know and don't yet trust and don't have confidence in that they will ever love like they have loved me. It seems vastly unfair to them, and horribly unnatural to me. It feels to me like something akin to a mother telling her young child, "I'm going to go now, and we won't see each other again, but another mama is going to come and she'll take very good care of you. Oh, and please do write me postcards and tell me how you're doing..." Abandoned...how is this right?

I am so grateful, and so incredibly humbled and awed, that I have been so privileged to know the souls that I have known in these past seven years of private practice. I can't believe it has been me that has been privileged to be witness to such pain, such struggle, such strength, and such transformation. God works so wondrously to mold us into the creatures he desires us to be - and it is so strange but also so wonderful that he allows us to be part of this process in and for each other. That I have been given such a hands-on role in this process for the lives that have graced my couch is something I can't even put words on. I am so grateful. And so, very, profoundly, sad.

For God's wise and loving care for these souls I am also profoundly grateful. Were it my care and wisdom they depended upon alone, they would be truly lost. So it is that I know they will be okay...and hopefully over time, this will not feel so badly to them, or to me. And maybe if the pain starts to dull just a little, I can make myself start packing up my office. For now, just the thought makes me sick.