Gemini vs Gemini

Essay A

I used to watch parents at the airport or the park—the ones hovering with a mixture of desperate adoration and frantic vigilance—and think, I will never be that person. I saw their attachment as a choice, a dial they simply hadn’t learned to turn down. I viewed “parental love” as a predictable, abstract milestone, like getting a driver’s license: a bit of a hassle, but ultimately just a new way to get from A to B.

Then came the first morning of daycare.

The realization didn’t hit me during the “big” moments of birth or the first steps. It hit me when I was standing in a hallway that smelled of industrial lavender and finger paint, clutching a tiny, dinosaur-themed backpack. Suddenly, the abstract concept of love became a physical weight in my chest, sharp and inconvenient. I found myself obsessing over the most mundane details: Did I tell the teacher that he likes his crusts cut into triangles? (He doesn’t even care about the shape, but I cared that someone knew he might.)

Inside the experience, love felt less like a warm glow and more like a low-grade, irrational fever. I realized that my desire for him to stay “safe” was actually a selfish desire for him to stay mine. I wanted to keep him in the bubble of our living room where I controlled the variables. Sending him through that classroom door felt like watching a vital organ walk away from my body and start a conversation with a stranger.

It is a quiet, necessary heartbreak to realize that the best way to love someone is to provide them with the tools to eventually not need you. Now, I understand that the “hovering” I once mocked wasn’t a lack of chill; it was the friction caused by the soul trying to stay attached to a person who is designed to let go. I walked back to my car, feeling lighter and heavier all at once, finally accepting that the dial doesn’t turn down—you just learn to live with the music.

Essay B

You read it, hear it, often even see glimpses of it – the parents’ love for a child. But I didn’t really know what was going on in the brain cells of the parents that made them look at their miniature disappointments with such soppy gooey eyes.

Until a year into being a mom.

My son’s first birthday was approaching, and we were finally getting ready to put him in daycare. And I, generally a rational, calm, sensible person, suddenly found myself struck with a completely irrational fear – that I was going to miss out. 

And that’s when it hit me. When you’re a parent, you don’t want to miss ANY of it. Not the ever present drop of drool on the chin, or the runny nose, the angelic sleepy face or the devilish naughty one. The excited giggle, or the yawn (how on earth is a yawn cute?! I look away any time any other human displays the innards of their mouth to me), the gears turning behind his eyes as he takes the world in, sometimes at half speed of what I expect, and sometimes at triple speed. When I’m not staring at him, I’m often trying to figure out what to do so that the NEXT time I am staring him, he’s thriving.

So, sending him to daycare is going to be hard. There, he’ll laugh with others (though not too much, he’s as stoic as the Godfather), maybe start standing and walking, learn what “yellow” is, and those thoughts makes me SO sad. 

But that’s still better for him than hanging out with me all the time, because here I am, just staring at him, making him play my 3 games, read my 5 books and eat my 4 meal options . He got places to be, things to learn, and wings to spread.

Go my little one, go far. Just let me watch you as you soar.