Today at the park, you found yourself a friend. Pretty great to watch, I must say. You following this girl, Abby, around, trying to hug the living bejeezus out of her while she shrieked with laughter. She was older than you by a year or so, but you thought she was the greatest thing since applesauce cups. You had a tea party under the slide, threw wood chips on a baby quietly minding its own business nearby, but mostly you just chased each other and hugged. In fact, when her mother took her and her siblings to the field to play soccer, you stood at the wood-post perimeter of the park and said bye bye Abby over and over, waving your little arm. Almost made my heart burst, the way you love people with such reckless abandon.

I also noticed today, on the slide, your interest in the different Moms with their kids. You wanting to vie for their attention, like all kids do of their Moms. I think you sense your mother’s absence keenly during the week, a void I cannot fill, nor do I want to. But it got me thinking–which is probably a rare event in and of itself. What will you think of your Mom when you get older? Plenty of stories of adults pining for absent fathers who worked themselves to the bone, but were never around for their kids’ crisis. Will you think the same way, only of your mother? Perhaps if I tell you about her, you will gain an understanding. Since she is so unlikely to speak about herself, it may indeed be my duty to inform.

Your mom is a rare gem of infinite beauty, a persona made up of several identities. She is Mom, but she is also artist. She is creator, a person who sees story and image and light and deftly combines them into art. She senses the music of the world without having to speak about it (unlike your Papa, who comments ad nauseum). She is also reader, a person with a voracious appetite for words, for consuming them but also analyzing them. She sees different truths around her not because she’s been told to see them, but because she’s discovered them for herself. This makes her strong, Simone–something I see in you as well. She is fierce in her ability to see things for what they are. She is passionate about you, whether with us during play, or away at work. And she is irreplaceable.

But there is also an independence to her. She is not able to stay at home, day in and day out. And this has nothing to do with a lack of love, but a brilliant wildness to her that we should embrace. I am a home-body, and in some ways more suited to the routines of daily living with a child. This is not a commentary on talents, but of personality, I think. Our roles could easily be switched around and you would be none the worse for it. But I’m not sure it would suit your parents. Roles are not a matter of gender or tradition (thank goodness), but of personality. Your mother’s  absence during the day is both a necessity to our living but also to her sanity. Ugh, that sounded far more Oprah than I was intending.

What I’m saying with all this, Simone, is that she has the deserved right to be her self. And this right extends to you as it does to me. There are times, I’m sure she’d prefer nothing more than to be at home with us, unable to do so because of her obligations to work (I won’t concern you with that for awhile yet). But there are times when being away is right for her, when being at work provides an important part to her identity.

When you are older, Simone, and you find yourself looking for things to resent about your parents (don’t worry, we all do it). I hope you find this post. Not to curb your resentment, for all parents are deserving of it at some point or another, but to provide some insight–albeit subjective from my perspective, to who your mother is. I think you’ll discover most of this on your own, and probably find a better way to articulate it. But for now, this is your mother, as I see and love her.