Dear Aida, About next week...

My sweet Aida,

I hope you don't mind that we rocked a little longer than usual tonight.

These days and nights, I want to memorize every second I have with you. Your tiny body, warm against my chest. Your furry head, nestled perfectly against my neck. The soft, breathy talking sound you make when I scoop you into my lap for the day's final feeding.

Boy do I wish I could stop time.

We've had three months. Fifteen weeks. An otherworldly get-to-know-you period of late nights and early mornings, of intimacy the likes of which I have never before experienced. You have consumed my every thought and action. My waking and my sleeping. My eating and even my not eating.

I am not ready for this to end.

 In four days, sweetie, I won't be here for you every hour and minute of your day. We will wake and I will feed you. We will talk and you will smile and I will kiss you a dozen times or more like I do every morning. Then, I will put on a nice pair of shoes and some lipstick and I will leave the house, returning to a job that, until you were born, came to define a significant portion of who I am.

For eight hours -- four times longer than the longest we've ever been apart -- you will eat and sleep and play without me. And while I know you will be fine (how could you not be when the person caring for you is your ever-loving grandmother?), the mere thought of this change sends me into fits of sobbing.

While you are growing and changing and making connections, I will be a couple miles away, trying to reengage with a world where time is measured by daily deadlines, not nap times and feedings, and working my damnedest to make it home by bath time.

Soon, you will sit up unassisted for the first time and I may miss it. You will roll over from your back to your front and I may miss that, too. Your first word. Your first crawl. Your first step. Your first fall. Will I be here to witness?

I know our story has only just started. If God grants us the time, we will have many moments, hours, days and years together. We will still sing songs and take baths and go for walks and read books and play games. I will teach you how to eat solid food and use the potty, how to spell your name and recite the alphabet. One day, we will ride bikes and roller skate and jog and swim. I will take you shopping and camping and kite-flying and dancing.

And while I expect our lives together will only become more interesting as you grow, I am heart-broken to leave the cocoon of our first time together, this period when all of my life is dedicated to you -- tiny, blue-eyed, wide-smiled, dimpled, cooing, stretching, crying, pooping, practice-standing, grabbing, burping, sleeping little you.

Already, you've changed so much. You used to sleep all the time. Now you cry when it's time for a nap. Once content to travel with your head buried in my chest, now you look around on our walks, so interested in the trees above you, the water beside you, the people who stop to smile and coochie-coo over you. You no longer fit into your newborn clothes. You're trying your hardest to pull yourself up to sit. And you're on the verge of moving up to the third size of diapers.

With you, change happens so fast. I want to see it all.

Last night, I broke down on the phone when I was talking to my friend Michelle about our impending back-to-work separation. A working mother of three, she mourned with me but reminded me that while there's a chance I might miss some of your firsts, you will do them again. If you sit once, you will sit again. If you roll over once, you will roll over again.

I am certain there are some good things besides a paycheck that will come from my going back to work. For God's sake, the women who came before me worked hard to give someone like me a place in this profession, right?

Maybe my working will be an example to you of work ethic and independence. I do want you  to work hard and become independent, after all. And maybe I'll come to appreciate having another outlet in my life beyond family. I mean, until you came along, I was perfectly in love with the work I do.

But, truthfully, right this moment, the only thing I want is to be mommy to you. To be here to feed you, to rock you, to soothe you when you're sad and help you learn the things you need to learn to be successful in this life.

I hope that by the time you're a mommy, our leaders who profess to care about "family values" will have figured out better ways to make it financially feasible for poor and middle class families like ours to invest the kind of time it takes to raise our nation's children. You deserve to have your mommy there and I want nothing more than to be there for you.

So, forgive me if in the next few days I let a tear slip as I bathe you or nurse you. Bear with me if it takes me a little longer for me to rise from the rocker and put your sleeping body in your crib. I just love being with you and it's going to take all my strength Monday to walk out that door, start the engine and drive away.

Love,
Mommy

Aida and Mommy, Feb. 12, 2011.