Worth a thousand words

I have noticed that Gillian likes to arrange the passengers in her little toy car like this:

Coincidence? Mama is sitting in the backseat, and baby is driving the car. Now I'm feeling all philosophical. Because YES, she sure is driving the car. She probably will be for the rest of my life. The direction of our lives has shifted since she joined them, and our ship is being steered always with her welfare and happiness in mind.

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Besides being particularly emotionally vulnerable at this moment, something G did today made me incredibly sad. She wanted to walk, and hold my hand while she walked (even though it is documented in video footage that she is perfectly capable of walking by herself). We made the usual route around the house (laps, as it were), and I noticed that she wasn't saying "Bababa...bababa" like I first thought, but "Papa? papa?" So we called him and I put him on speaker, and she kissed the phone and waved at it. I told her that Papa was at work today. A while later, she wanted to walk again, and started trotting down the hall toward the back door, saying "Papa?" She got to the kitchen, clearly expecting him to be there and looked confused when he wasn't. She went to the back door, the one he comes through every time he comes home, and tried to open it herself, saying "Papa? Pa-pa??", convinced he was home. This is when I, the emotional sap, got a huge lump in my throat and got that quick tear-sting and felt so very sorry that Papa wasn't coming home right then. This relatively benign experience got me thinking about how much it must break a mother's heart to see her children experience disappointment and sadness, and how I never realized how much that is going to really, truly suck till now. I took for granted my mother's patience in dealing with me and am overcome with feeling sorry about all the times she must have ached in private watching me hurt (and God knows I did plenty of hurting). 'Cause the world isn't all kittens and sunshine, and one day our precious girl is going to start noticing that not everyone is interested in loving her the way we love her. In fact some people are ugly for the sake of being ugly, and on purpose. Heavy stuff, this motherhood thing.