Over Easter weekend Scarlette rode a pony for the first time. I’ve never seen her so excited and it was one of my favorite moments that I have experienced as her mother so far.
For me the tears seem to come at the oddest moments. They never fall when they are supposed to, when we’re at another specialists office, holding her down for another invasive procedure, stomach twisting in knots as she screams. They surprise me suddenly at moments like this, when I set her gently in a saddle, unsure, and she turns to me, beaming, with a smile that could melt the hardest of hearts and says “YEAH! I WIKE DIS MOMMY! I WIKE DIS HORSHIE! I WIKE DIS!”
I always worry that the doctors all think that I am unfeeling when she falls and needs staples in her head and I don’t cry. I know it’s a trivial worry, I know that it’s borne of a string of months where self-preservation traded tears for talking bili levels and threading tubes and counting breaths. I’m okay with that because I feel confident in a crisis but I still worry that the stoic will be mistaken for uncaring.
And I go to events like this and then I worry that everyone thinks that I’m an emotional basketcase when I suddenly start sobbing over Scarlette smiling at ponies. Because to a stranger, she’s just another kid riding a horse but to me she is miracle and magic.
(And then if you’d seen the incredible tantrum she threw when she had to get OFF said pony and subsequently be carried screaming out of the arena, you’d have been like “Oh honey, you cry all you want to.” Meaning me. Because OH MY GOSH THAT TANTRUM.)
