So I was gone for two nights.  THAT’S IT: TWO NIGHTS.  It wasn’t even enough to really pack a suitcase (which I did, cause, you know, shoes); just enough for me to miss my child as if he had been ripped from my arms.

Seriously, I was DYING to see him.  I hauled ass back from New Orleans.. NOLA, the place that is my second home and I ferociously miss.. I hauled ass to LEAVE THAT PLACE.  Because I missed my son.  MISSED HIM, with the fire of a thousand suns.  I missed my kid.

I picked him up at daycare and it was everything I thought it would be.  “MOMMA!” from across the room, all smiles and hugs and wiggles and rubbing my shoulder like he does while he hugs me and I breathed him in and thought, Yes, my baby, we’re complete again, huh?

AND THEN?

God, it was only lacking the spinning of his head and accompanying pea soup.

I don’t know what the hell happened.  He spent the entire night hitting me, alternately squawling and laughing at the punishments.  He was.. I dunno.. mad at me or something.  He made my life REALLY hard and once I finally confined him to his crib (not that he went to sleep for TWO HOURS without screaming, oh nooooo), I sat on the couch and cried.  This was NOT the baby I left.  And Bryan was out of town for the night, so it was just me and that anti-baby out there.

******

I actually wrote that first part the morning after it happened.  I was DREADING going home that next day, as if it would just be another cold tumble into a pool of I HATE MOMMY that I had always heard about but OHNO, would NEVER happen to me, with my SUPERIOR mommying skills that I attained through watching hours of SuperNanny and being a stepparent for years before a baby entered the house.

And all of it was true: the hate, the anger, the bitterness.. from both of us.  It all happened.  He was horrible to me, and I was hurt, and he was proud of himself for hurting me, and I wondered where I had gone wrong.

I went to pick him up on Wednesday afternoon, fearing the inevitable.

And there he was: my baby.  He was HAPPY to see me, and I was happy to see him, and we fell into an easy rhythm.. a rhythm we had every day, without fail.. which I had broken by leaving town.  And I realized that he was probably just as cross about ME breaking our rhythm as I was about HIM breaking it when I got back.  I had taken my lashes, made my mea culpa, and now life was allowed to continue.

*****

Then Bryan and I got the worst stomach flu EVER.  The end.