Last October I went to Vietnam, alone, leaving my husband and kids behind. And now I am 11 days away from leaving for Vietnam again. I have written a book/journal chronicling the last year of my life. I doubt I will ever publish it but this is the excerpt from my book about my "good-bye" before I caught my flight to Vietnam...
"I woke up at 3:30 a.m. this morning to catch my 6:40 a.m. flight. I promised my daughter I would wake her to say goodbye, and, so I did as I promised. I look at her curly locks all tied up in a scrunchy so as not to suffocate her in the night. She has the most unusually naturally curly hair that grows about as quickly as grass during a drought. I think she’s only had about a half-dozen haircuts in her whole life, but when that mane is wet and all flattened out, it reaches past the middle of her back. It’s the source of many morning arguments, that hair of hers.
She cocoons herself in her bed sheet 365
days a year, regardless of the temperature. She’s generally a warm person, so
it’s not unusual for her to be sweating in her cocoon and her little loose neck
hairs to be curled up even tighter than usual. But, this morning, when I lean
down to hug her good-bye, she’s not sweating—she’s warm like fresh-baked bread.
She appears to be expecting me because she un-cocoons her arms before I get low
enough to hug her. She likely heard me blow-drying my hair.
“Mommy’s leaving now,” I whisper, resting
my cheek on her head.
“Love you, mommy,” she squeaks out in her
sleep, while reaching up to hug me.
“I’ll see you in 16 days. I love you so
much, curly.” I have aptly nicknamed her “curly,” and I am the only one who
calls her that. Only when I’m angry or when she is not listening to me, do I
call her by her real name, Freddie.
I turn off all the lights and sneak
downstairs. We live in a four-bedroom house where two of the bedrooms are
upstairs, and the other two are on the main floor. The two “big kids” have
their rooms upstairs, while the master bedroom and baby’s room are on the main
floor.
In our bedroom, I feel up the blankets in
the dark until I reach my husband’s shoulder. I trace my hand over his cheek
and hold him by his head to tilt him back so that I can find his lips. I give
him a kiss.
“Have a great time,” he says, still asleep.
“Thank you so much,” I say, because, after
all, he has supported this opportunity for me for personal and professional
growth, somewhat to my surprise, since I told him about it three months ago.
And, without his encouragement, I may very well have backed out of it.
“I love you,” I say and sneak out into the
hallway. I rarely tell my husband I love him, because I feel I should only say
it when I really feel it, and, right now, at this very moment, I really feel
it.
I pause at my son’s door. I don’t dare kiss
him for fear of waking him, so I peak in his room at his tiny curled up form on
his “big boy” twin-sized bed and draw in one last deep breath of that smell
that is so uniquely his. No other room in the house smells like his, and, over
the past two years, I’ve probably spent more time in his room than any other
room in the house. I spent countless hours breastfeeding him in the brown
rocking chair in the corner … the same rocking chair my mother rocked my
brother to sleep in 30 years ago. I spent the first year of my son’s life
sleeping on his bedroom floor. First, so that I could always hear him breathing
to be reassured that he was still alive; and second, so that our nightly feeding
sessions would cause as little disturbance as possible to the rest of the
sleeping family.
The smell of my son is a mix of fresh, new
diaper scent, olive-oil bath wash, clean laundry and new baby smell. It’s
heavenly. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever gone a day without planting a kiss
on his head and taking in a big whiff of his smell. I love it. It’s actually
very calming to me. If I stand at his door any longer I will be brought to
tears, so I gently close it, put on my Nikes and head out to the airport.
As I drive to the airport, I am a fury of
mixed emotions. I feel so free and liberated that I have the ability to fly
halfway around the world, by myself. Free to do pretty much whatever I want,
whenever I want. But, I also know that when my son wakes up, he will call out
for mommy, and mommy won’t be there, and, unfortunately, at 2 years and 1 month
old, there is no real way to explain that to him."
This time will be a little different. Kids are older, I've done it once before, our family dynamic has changed, and I know from experience, that everything will be great - for them, and for me. Vietnam, here I come!!!
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