So as summer gets closer, the guilt about leaving Rokia has become overwhelming. To refresh your memory: my plan was to leave with Amina at the end of July and go start job and house/apartment searching. My SO and Rokia would stay in Mali until the visa was ready and then they'd join us. By my calculations, that could be anywhere between September and December. Or even later if we ran into any unexpected problems.

But now, I look at my sweet girl Rokia and I feel so guilty about leaving her. I worry that she'll feel abandoned (she was abandoned by her biological mother and I don't know how much she realizes that or is currently affected by that). I worry how things will be with her alone with my SO. I know that he'll step up to some extent but she is so accustomed to me and our routines.

So I've started to consider a plan B. It's not really the plan in my best interest- the best thing for me emotionally and setting-up-our-lives-in-the-USA wise would be to go. But it's the plan that is the best for Rokia and she and Amina are my number 1 priority. So in Plan B, I'd take Rokia and Amina to the US for summer vacation (which sounds exhausting but I'll just have to deal) and my mom said she would help a bunch with the kids so that I could maybe start putting some feelers out for the job hunt. And then we'd all return to Mali in the fall. My job said that they'd possibly take me on again for the first few months of the school year since there are no good candidates for the moment. We'd continue waiting out the visa and then go interview in Senegal together. When we hopefully got the visas, I would go ahead to the States with Amina maybe a month before Rokia and my SO, to get set up as much as I could and then they'd come. I'd still be leaving Rokia for a bit of time but it'd be a much shorter time with a precise end date that she could count down to.

Thoughts? I personally don't LOVE the plan. But it's not the time to be selfish when you've got kids to think about. As my SO put it, yes Rokia could handle it (me leaving) but that doesn't mean that she should have to. She's already been through a lot.