What Do You Do with a Kangaroo?

I love to read. Growing up this title was one of my favorite books. From an early age my mother did the thing that nurtured a child's imagination like nothing else. She took me to the library. Every week we had loads of books and we knew the librarians by name, they were our friends. Going to the library was not just about going to see them, or getting new books, it was a trip into the land of imagination and fantasy. Mom would study the illustrators and track their new books, the pictures being just as important as the stories for transporting us into different places. I learned how to solve problems, how to think about things from different points of view, how to empathize with people that had challenges that I knew nothing about. Even though she is gone now, the love of reading that she gave me remains, and to this day I find little that compares with the exhilaration and contentment of curling up and reading a new book.

All of this is a preamble to one thing that has been on my mind of late. How do you solve the problem of watching things move forward in someone's life that you love while yours goes in the opposite direction? I know there must be at least one story I read that helped me learn this lesson, but right now I am at a loss for which it was. I think all of us who know this issue are struggling. Happy with our own direction but bereft when we think of those we love moving into another one. Losing my husband was a different lesson- it was one in how to handle being a single entity when I had been operating as a double. This is not the same kind of thing- it is more like how to operate with a whole part of those who make up your family identity, absent, and at the same time- finding joy in it. The first thing (loss) is easy in that regard. No one expects you to be happy about it. You are given freedom to be sad and even angry. The second issue is open. I know my sis is glad to allow feelings of sadness, but I want to be happy. I do not want to mourn her leaving! I want to rejoice at this new and wonderful place that she is moving into. So, I can't find the answer in "What Do You Do with a Kangaroo". But if anyone can think of a good solution- I would love to hear it.