I used to slip out in the middle of the night to catch the 5:30am flight to the client-of-the-moment. Or I’d drop Sosie off at school and after an extra long hug and big kiss, I’d take off and leave it to Daddy to both pick up and pick up the pieces in my absence.
But I always thought she knew. Even at six months when I started to pick up travel again after her birth, she had a sixth sense for my vanishing act. Those early pre-flight mornings were the only mornings she woke up for a midnight snack. It’s like she could smell the suitcase, the lunch and dinner prep, the incessant note writing and just wanted one more cuddle before I shipped off.
Now it’s a different ballgame. Sure, I still pack the lunches and ready the dinners. But I no longer hide the suitcase. And before I go, I can actually tell Sosie that I have to go to work tonight, but I’ll be home tomorrow. And then she launches the first of her many prickly arrows, landing deep, deep, deep in my heart: “But I don’t want you to go.”
She understands that Mommy works. Now thanks to a new laptop with a video camera, she understands that Mommy sometimes works in weird hotel rooms with strange lighting schemes and sometimes in suites with nicer kitchen appliances than we own. She understands that I’m away and that I miss her and that I’ll come home and that we’ll sink back into our normal routine again. After all of this growing up she’s busy doing every day, it’s still incredibly amazing to have these conversations with her and this level of understanding between us.
But she doesn’t quite fully understand yet the difference between “want to go” and “have to go.” We’re working on that one together because, frankly, I don’t think I fully understand it either. Seems like in a perfect world they wouldn’t be able to coexist, no? Or perhaps in a perfect world, they would mean the exact same thing.
