Mean

…..I looked backwards as I stood at the threshold of the daycare lady’s front door and my three-month-old daughter Sam was staring back at me with large, sorrowful eyes, equally alarmed and incredulous that I would be leaving her alone in a strange place with a friendly, yet altogether unfamiliar, lady.  And right then she began crying—just bawling her lungs out hysterically at an unearthly volume.  I felt awful…..traumatized…..distraught…..abusive.  Truth is, I couldn’t have felt worse than I did at that exact moment and still been drawing breaths and classifying myself as a feeling homo sapiens.  My heart was being ruthlessly ripped out of my chest and stomped on savagely by the purveyors of fate, and they were evidently having loads of fun doing so. This was Carla’s first day back at work following a three-month maternity leave, and thus it was Sam’s first morning experiencing out-of-home daycare and I was the party responsible for getting her there safely. I blinked reflexively.  Shiiiiitttt……..this horrible nightmare can’t honestly be happening to me, can it?!?!  Is this for real?!?!  I SWEAR THAT I AM INNOCENT OF ANY WRONGDOING, AND YET THAT FACT DOESN’T SEEM TO MATTER ONE STINKIN’ BIT!!!!!  The day obviously wasn’t getting off to a good start, and I was feeling even more dispirited than before if that was in fact possible.  At a nerve-wracking time such as this you just recite all the predictable appropriate platitudes to yourself in an attempt to feel better:  That you have to go out to earn sufficient money in order to properly support your dependents, including Sam; that she has to be exposed to the Big Bad World by herself some day—so why not now??; that the person you are leaving her with for the upcoming day is compassionate and congenial and Sam therefore was in wonderful hands; that learning to properly socialize is critical to a child’s emotional development and at this place Sam will be surrounded by a phalanx of other young people roughly her age; that eventually she’ll be going off to official pre-school classes followed by kindergarten so she might as well get used to spending days by herself outside our cozy abode now; that…..that…..that…..that……  And yet none of those eminently logical reasons made a shred of difference as I stood there in that infernal doorway seeing my tiny, beloved daughter staring back at me uncomprehendingly like a caged animal while hearing her shrieking away hysterically at the top of her lungs.  The only thing I could think of—and which weighed on my mind right then with the mass of a blacksmith’s anvil—was that I was both the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the world as well as far and away the worst father—Take your pick, Reader!—and it was the last thought that crossed my mind as I tearfully peered backwards one last time at my woefully distraught daughter before heading off to my job at the Mayo Clinic.  Not surprisingly, the day that ensued measured thirty six hours in length and turned out to be the longest and most introspective day of my life…..