I Thought I Was Giving My Daughter A Life Any Kid Would Dream Of. I Was Shocked By Her Response.

Yahoo

5 days ago

Moving to Hawaii may sound like a dream come true, but for our family, it was a forced relocation thanks to a set of orders from the U.S. Navy. We were excited about island life, but five military duty stations into my marriage, I knew better than to expect an easy transition.
Week one felt like a vacation. My husband and I had never been to Hawaii, so everything was fresh: waterfall hikes, shave ice, world-class beaches. Even the one-lane traffic on the North Shore felt charming. These weren't orders we requested or expected, but we kept telling ourselves: This is going to be great! As well as: The kids are resilient! They're going to be fine!
By week two, our 5-year-old middle child, Alice, had fully committed to not being fine.
Her Hawaii life was starting to sound like her personal version of 'Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.' She had to share a bed with her little sister. Her nose got sunburned. On day three at the new-to-us beach, she got stung by a box jellyfish.
And all the other kids at the Navy Lodge seemed to be either her big brother's age or her little sister's — not a single new best friend in sight. Every sentence began with 'I juuuust don't like…' and ended with '…and can we please juuuuust go back to Virginia?'
Meanwhile, my husband and I were running dangerously low on optimism ourselves. Living in Hawaii quickly stopped feeling like vacation and started feeling like crushing reality: unbelievable grocery bills, including $9 for a gallon of milk, $4,000 to ship our car overseas, and mountains of paperwork to dig through, ranging from car registration to reimbursement for our stay at said Navy Lodge.
We pinned our hopes on the first day of school. Surely, a little structure would help everyone. Surely Alice would come home bubbling with new-friend stories, tired and happy from a long kindergarten day.
Nope.
At pick-up, full of best-case-scenario expectations, we asked, 'How was your day?' But instead of happily chirping about new friends and exciting specials, she launched into a tirade that rivaled any talking head you've seen on cable news.
Her school didn't even have a real playground — just a blacktop. All the other kindergartners had gone to pre-k together and didn't want to be her friend. She couldn't FaceTime Grandma after dinner because of the time difference. Her favorite after-school activity (playing on the backyard swingset) was 4,800 miles away. She was outraged that our hotel had only one potty instead of 'three potties, like a regular house.' And the novelty of eating dinner on paper plates on a hotel floor? Worn off, big time.
I want to be the mom who validates feelings and listens with saintly patience. But when your 5-year-old delivers a personalized podcast nightly on why your new home is the actual worst —and blames you personally— it wears a person down.
After a week, I made a quiet decision: I'd stop asking her how her day was. Not out of spite, but survival. If she wanted to tell me, she could, but I wasn't going to prompt her.
Next, I tried that thing adults always tell other adults: 'Focus on the positive.' I have journaled on and off for decades — from middle school drama to post-partum exhaustion — and I hoped maybe it could help Alice, too. I bought a jaunty little composition book with a cartoon sun on the cover and dubbed it 'Alice's Positivity Notebook.' We were going to fake it until we made it.
I told her we could still talk about every part of her day if she wanted, but for this notebook, she would just write down the good stuff. She could even draw a picture to go with it.
Fifteen minutes into our first journaling session, I was already defeated. Every prompt I offered — What made you smile? Who was kind to you? What was something fun? — was met with a shrug or a flat 'no.' We were living any middle child's dream, sitting outside on a warm Hawaiian evening just the two of us, and here was Alice complaining about never getting a snow day again. (Please note that during our two years in Virginia Beach, we only had half a day of snow, and she had not enjoyed it.)
Finally, she gave me something. 'I liked the clear noodles at lunch,' she mumbled.
Victory. I wrote down her verbatim sentence about the 'clear noodles,' handed her the crayons, and watched fallen plumeria blooms drift across the hotel lanai while she drew. A sad realization dawned on me: I couldn't force her into gratitude.
She had lost the only home she could remember. And even though we were somewhere beautiful, the view didn't erase the hard parts. I couldn't positivity-journal her way out of the grief of change.
I remembered how I felt when we first got our orders to Hawaii. I was losing a job I loved (it turns out 'remote work' has limits). We were heading to one of the most expensive places in the country. We were moving away from our friends and community we'd established in the military-friendly town of Virginia Beach.
I was nervous and overwhelmed. But when I voiced that to civilian friends, I was met with, 'We honeymooned in Maui, you're so lucky!' and 'We loved our week at Turtle Bay!' Talking about Friday night fireworks in Waikiki made for better conversation for my friends, so I stopped bringing it up, swallowing my apprehension.
And now here I was, asking Alice to do the exact same thing. Trying to gaslight her into enjoying things she wasn't (Yet, I told myself. Yet.).
If an adult talked to me the way I was talking to her — 'You're whining about having no friends and a pause in your career? Look at the sunsets and the novelty of wild chickens!!' — I'd want to scream.
I was allowed to struggle with the transition, to miss what we had and to take time to build something new. She was allowed that, too.
That night, I closed the notebook and reminded myself that with consistency, this notebook would be filled. Eventually, the entries would expand to include more than lunch noodles. The good, the bad: I needed to let her feel it all.
I decided I would still notice the beauty for her, gently saving it for her when she was ready, but I wouldn't use it to silence the hard stuff. The luaus and waterfalls weren't going anywhere, so for the moment, we could be excited about clear noodles.
Meanwhile, I started tending to my own feelings, too. I sought support from fellow military spouses — women who understand the 'and' of this lifestyle: the beauty and the privilege of living here and the challenges it presents.
One friend in particular always reminds me, 'You're not imagining it. This is as hard as it feels.'
It's her mantra, and I've adopted it as my own — a phrase I reach for whenever I start wondering if I'm overreacting or if someone else would be handling it all better. It doesn't fix anything, but it reminds me that what I'm navigating is genuinely challenging and that working through it is something to be proud of.
Speaking my concerns and frustrations out loud gave me the space to fully show up for my kids — not as the relentlessly cheerful mom, but just as a steady one.
We kept journaling, one entry a day. Slowly, the sessions and the tone began to shift with mentions of a fun math game in class, a few names of new friends, hula lessons, a sea turtle spotting, and a game of sharks and minnows on the blacktop. Inside the pages, we taped positive notes from teachers ('Alice is such a good listener!' and 'Alice helped a classmate today.') and birthday party invitations.
And while I'm not sure Alice will ever reconcile her not-so-new-now school's lack of playground equipment, I can report that today, no one in our family loves our island life more than Alice.
We still talk about the hard days when they come, but now the good parts of her day fill more than one bullet point… and Alice cheerfully recites them unprompted.
This experience didn't just teach me to sit with my daughter's feelings — it taught me to stop trying to rush her out of them. My job isn't to shield her from discomfort or aggressively mine her for silver just to create a lining. It's to walk beside her with honesty, to hold space for what's hard, while teaching her to notice the 'and'— the beauty that can exist alongside the hard parts.
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