*** Before I get started, we took our family pictures.  Check them out on Julie Campbell’s site: here, yo!  We even snuck a few kick-ass breastfeeding photos in.  Those are the ones from behind, with me sitting in the grass and Charlotte in her dinosaur hoodie and gum boots.  What a perfect capture of what it’s like nursing a two-year-old.

A couple days ago, I met up with a group of moms at a local park and somehow I ended up divulging my biggest, most grounded in CRAZY, most ridiculous mom fear: I’m terrified that I will forget what Charlotte looks like.

It makes me sound certifiable, but there it is.  Some parents worry that their child will stop breathing in the night.  Some parents agonize over college funds.  Some parents fret about home invasion.  When I’m apart from my daughter for longer than about two hours, I worry that I won’t recognize her.  That she won’t remember me.  That I won’t remember her.

On the flip side, how I could ever forget a face like this is beyond me.

A few more hours and I start to panic that she doesn’t exist.  That she died and I just manufactured a fantasy world to cope.  Or worse, that she never existed, that this was all a dream.

In my defense, I never said I had all my marbles.

ANYWAY, so we all stood around and I said that and a few other moms shared their irrational fears and we all had a good laugh at each other.  Then we went to have a picnic and talk about other things.  Important things.  Like babies and husbands and who got whom addicted to which crappy television show.

After a few snacks, we cut the kids loose to play and explore at whim.  And at some point after that it occurred to me that I had not seen Charlotte in awhile.  I looked to the left – nothing.  To the right – nothing.  Behind me – nothing.  I looked again.  Then I stood up, looking frantically all over.

“Are you looking for something, Sarah?” one of the other moms asked.  “Charlotte,” I said breathlessly.  My feet felt frozen.  My heart was thundering.

The mom looked at me confused.  “She’s right there,” she said, “right in front of you.”  And so she was.  About two feet away from me, right under my nose, staring intently at a bunch of cucumber she’d mashed between her fingers.  Where she had been, now that I was calm enough to think about it, THE. ENTIRE. TIME.

I laughed, everyone laughed, then one of the other moms joked that I wasn’t kidding about not recognizing my own kid and we laughed a little harder.

Yesterday I was away from Charlotte for four hours and every time I worried about her, I remembered her standing there in her bright red t-shirt two feet away from me and I had to suppress a huge belly laugh.  The longer I’m a mom, the more I think that sometimes the only way you ever overcome foolish fears is by making a fool of yourself.

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