Dear Reese,
I drop you off at daycare this morning, and, for the first time, you start crying when you see me walk away. Typically you start playing with a toy or are too distracted by the room to care when I leave. Today, you look right at me and your face screws up before you start wailing.
I go back, pick you up, tell you it’s okay and I love you and I help you find a toy in another part of the room. I tell you I’ll be back later. I set you down, kiss your head, and leave. You cry. Your teachers are there, sympathetic, and Miss Melissa picks you up. I waver but then decide the best thing I can do is leave so you can focus on all the fun things around you instead of me.
It’s awful. I cry on the short drive to work. I tell three people about it throughout the day, other parents who I know will get it. You are right at that age where separation anxiety can kick in, so I suppose this is normal. Normal, but brutal. It feels very special that you want to be with me and it’s heartbreaking to leave you, even though I know you like your teachers and have fun at daycare. You usually smile when you see them every morning.
At pickup this evening they say you had a good day — that you were okay as soon as I was out of sight. They say you loved your leftover mac & cheese and that you have started watching the other kids more. You’ll go over to them to see what they are doing. This is a little bit of a problem since some of the older babies are always trying to get to the kitchen area, where babies aren’t supposed to be, and you’re following their lead. I tell them about how you saw your cousin Kai going upstairs while we were at the Blue Harbor Resort and you tried to copy him and then got frustrated when you couldn’t.
It’s Kai’s first birthday today. I remember, a year ago, getting the midnight text that your Aunt Amanda and Uncle Wes were at the hospital. I got up and packed in the middle of the night and then drove down to Madison early in the morning, desperate to be nearby. He wasn’t born until later in the evening, too late to visit, but we (me, MorMor, Cappi) got to FaceTime in to meet him and learn his name. The joy we had when they told us Kai’s middle name was Troup — MorMor’s maiden name, your Uncle Wes and my middle names, and your middle name too. We have a clan of Troup Morgans now.
Your Aunt Amanda sends a picture of 1-year-old Kai today and I find the first picture we got of him, just after he was born. That is not his first time around, I remember thinking. He already looks wise to the world.
We’ll see Kai for his party this weekend down in New Glarus. Your second Madison trip. Hopefully this time we’ll both be healthy for it.
We have a little dance party before your bath tonight. I do the dance to Dasha's “Austin” for you to see if I remember the steps and then I pick you up and lift you up and down through the air to Panic at the Disco’s “High Hopes”. You smile every time you’re up above my head.
But I get real laughter at you post-bath when I tickle you through the towel. Your eyes sparkle, darling.
I tear up one more time today, unexpectedly, when I step out of the shower. I’m listening to the audiobook of The Let Them Theory and my mind wanders to all the choices I made where I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing. The big ones that changed my life and risked my happiness. And it strikes me again for a moment, as I see you sleeping on the monitor, I made the right choice after all. A thousand paths to take over a decade or more and I somehow found the one that led me to you.
What a miracle.
Love,
Mama