So I have been saying for months that I would like to go on a vacation, a vacation minus one small child so that it actually feels like a vacation. I said this before we went with my husbands family to Hawaii. I said that we would have a much more relaxing time without him and I was dreading a 5 1/2 hour flight with my EXTREMELY active toddler. My husband said that he would do fine on the flight, besides it was a family vacation and he was afraid that I would have a hard time being away from the kid for that long. So, we ended up taking the kid and having a fun but not so relaxing vacation. On the way home, as our child had an emotional meltdown for all 200 passagers on the airplane to enjoy, my husband turned to me and said those three beautiful words "you were right".
Well a few weeks ago my husband surprised me by planning a trip to Santa Barbara for a night, just the two of us. It was going to be a short trip but I was SO excited. The day came and I put my child down for a nap gave my mother a 6 page list of everything she might possibly need to know in the next 24 hours (ridiculous... yes but it was the first time I left my child overnight and I don't know, I just started writing and the next thing I knew it was 6 pages...I don't know what happened), and I got into my car eagerly anticipating my mini vacation.
However, as I drove further and further away from my baby, my heart started to ache and my throat clenched as I tried to hold back tears and not arrive to pick up my husband from his office sobbing, and I knew that HE was right. I would have never made it through Hawaii. As I drove I tried to make sense of it. I was still so excited to spend time away, I did not want to take him on the trip, and I knew that my mother would smother him with love and attention... so what was my problem.
This is what I finally came up with. I knew I would miss him, but I could handle that because I knew that I would be back soon. What I couldn't handle was the thought that HE would miss me. That he want me and look for me and I wouldn't be there and that he wouldn't understand. He doesn't have a concept of time or an understanding of leaving and coming back. Which is shown evertime my husband tries to leave for work and our child gets SO upset. He can't quite grasp the concept that although someone leaves they will come back. And that is what was killing me. I was afraid that he would notice that I was gone and not understand why or that I would be back.
We had a great time. We ate out and didn't have to worry about what the kid would eat, we walked around a lot with out having to push a stroller or haul half our house around with us, we went shopping without an impatient child in tow. It was great!
I realized though that we are in FULL baby mode. The whole time I kept catching myself planning out things that the baby would like to do. I saw millions of parks and places that he would have loved to run around. Every time we sat down to eat we seemed to be surrounded by birds (which is one of the only things that my child will watch for hours). And at 8 at night my husband and I were exhausted but we fought the erge to just go to bed since this was a baby free vacation with no bedtimes that we had to follow. We went to bed by 10:30, I still didn't sleep through the night in fact I found myself waking up listening for a cry that would never come, and we still woke up by 8 am. We are parents what can we say.
The next morning I called my mom to see how her night went and she said that the baby had slept through the night. Then she told me a story that she thought I would find cute and funny. She said that he had trouble going to sleep, when she laid him down and he stood right up and said "ma ma". (He doesn't say "ma ma" that often, he prefers saying "da da" and has for the past 10 months.) I barely got off the phone before I started crying. I had this perfect picture in my head of exactly how that story had played out because that was exactly what I had been worrying would happen. I knew that he had wanted me, had needed me because only that would have prompted him to ask specifically for me. And suddenly I didn't need time away from him any more. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to go home to my little baby to hold him and have him know that I was there.
yes, this post did make me cry!
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