Tick...tick...911

Last week I returned to work, and through a painful series of events have ended up entrusting my children into the care of a new nanny I met only 72 hours before. As I watched them pull out of the driveway the first time, I had a moment of panic that has yet to fully subside. What do I know about this woman? So she had references...who says they weren't faked? So I have a copy of her driver's license...who says she's not a con woman and it's a fake too? WHAT DO I REALLY, TRULY KNOW AND WHO WILL I CALL IF MY CHILDREN DO NOT RETURN IN THE NEXT 10 MINUTES???

Working mothers have dealt with this issue for years, and I know that I am more fortunate than most to have a nanny rather than dropping my children off at some mucus-heavy day care with the possibility of a Mary McMartin scandal hiding in the closet. But to watch my children drive away, realizing that Madelena has never even been a car with Gregg — I am her sole chauffeur and primary caregiver — I felt a tightening in my chest and a flipping in my stomach not unlike what I experienced looking over the edge of the observation deck on the Empire State Building. Even the fleeting thought of anything happening to my children is enough to drop me to my knees.

Before I had children, parents told me there were no words to describe the depth of love and emotion you feel for your own child, regardless of how they came to be your child. I nodded as if I understood, foolishly believing that I DID understand. Gregg at one time told me he hated people telling him that because he felt it was arrogant and rude and patently false. But now that we are both parents, I know that at least one of us finally knows what we didn't know — that having a young child is more akin to falling in love, and always being in the crazy falling part. You are filled with angst and overwhelming tenderness and vulnerability and lability and a desire to be as close to that person as you can be, to crawl inside them or eat them up...yet you have moments when you're angry with them for not fulfilling your every dream of who they are or could be, when they have just screamed and scratched your face as you tried to show them off in a public place, when they decide that it was more important to steal your keys and fling them into the bin of produce than to smile or coo or present that loving, delicious face you so often see at home. But, being so deeply and crazily in love, you forgive them everything instantly.

I keep waiting for that moment when turning my back on my son as I leave him at school becomes as easy as dropping off the dry cleaning. When handing Madelena's round little body to someone else becomes a relief and I lose the hesitation as her body loses contact with mine. When I am finally able to take them for granted in the same way they take me for granted, surely one of the best signs of their confidence in our family and their place in it. But for now I will continue to tamp down the panic each and every time the new nanny takes them out of the house, every time I hear the bath running and I am not there to patrol the waters, and every time I listen to my daughter cry from her crib while I am stuck on a conference call and reliant on someone else's not-so-sensitive ears.

Yes, I do want to have a life away from my children. I miss movies and yoga and coffee with adults and having the first voice I hear in the morning be Gregg's instead of Shawn Joaquin's insistent whine: I WANNA SLEEP WITH YOU. YOU'RE IN MY SPACE. DON'T SLEEP THAT WAY. But until there's a way to shrink them down and put them in a little locket around my neck like Orion's galaxy, I will continue to struggle between my need for independence and the need to make sure that when someone screws up and they end up scarred or maimed or just weepy, I'm the one responsible.