How are you supposed to keep from tearing up when a four-year-old, with one hand on your cheek and the other wiping your eye, tell you “no tears” as you’re strapping her into her car-seat?
I don’t know where my daughter gets it from, this almost sixth sense or awareness of my emotions and my moods, but damnit she does, and really always has. The older she gets it seems she’s getting better at being in tune with what’s going on with me.
When she was little (comparatively speaking) she was always able to tell when I was down or had a bad day and needed a little extra attention and love to cheer me up, and now at four, she’s consoling me, because she knows how hard it is for me to let her go for a week.
When I sit and think about it, I’m at a loss of how I should feel, that my four-year-old is trying to console her thirty-two-year-old father, and honestly, in the end, I feel guilty for it. Guilty that I’m not being stronger for her. That I’ve let my emotions and being upset show through during all this, and that she sees it all. That instead of me holding her, petting her hair, and wiping away her tears, it’s her wiping my cheeks, looking at me with those beautiful blue eyes, and with a tone to her voice way older than her little four-year-old self, saying “Daddy, no tears”.