Last week (Thursday through Monday) I went to Las Vegas with my best friend. It was the first time I’d been away from my daughter overnight since she was born. (I guess, technically, I was away from her overnight when she was in the hospital with her heart problems and we were staying in the Ronald McDonald House. Except in that case, I was still sitting next to her about 18 hours a day, so it didn’t really feel like being away.)
I used to go to Las Vegas a lot – my husband and I used to vacation there two to three times a year. We gambled a lot (mostly poker), won a little, and spent a lot of money on very fancy dinners and luxurious spa treatments. It was awesome! So yeah, I was pretty excited about going back to Vegas for the first time in about four years.
It was fun…sort of. It definitely wasn’t as much fun as I used to have in Las Vegas, and I attribute that to a few factors: worries about the economy are hard to get past right now, Vegas itself seems a bit more somber and certainly much more expensive, it’s hard to have fun when you’re losing so much (my luck was AWOL this trip), and I had a cold-type virus the whole time I was there. But most of all, it was because I missed the Bean. I thought about her CONSTANTLY. One afternoon, I was doing a little shopping on my own and walked into FAO Schwartz at the Forum Shops. As I walked through two of the three floors, I was struck by two feelings: the first, I wanted to buy Veronica everything I saw, not a little because of guilt I felt about leaving her with her (totally capable and loving) father and going away on vacation. The second feeling was even more guilt, and the feeling of missing her so much it was overwhelming. I actually started to get a little choked up in FAO Schwartz, and I almost cried!
Shopping, and certainly shopping in Las Vegas, has never had that effect on me before.
By our last day in Vegas, I was sort of secretly looking forward to coming home. Sure, I talked to her on the phone every day and once we even did a video chat, using iChat between my friend’s Macbook in the hotel room and mine back at home (and the Bean, adorably, was much more taken with her OWN image in the chat window than her mommy’s). It wasn’t the same though, the way I missed her was painful and depressing, and only tempered by the thought that I’d see her and have her in my arms again soon. It’s funny how a toddler who insists on sitting on your lap when you’re trying to do some trivial task seems annoying, until you’re away from her for more than a day and realize how much you’d pay just to have her sit on your lap right that minute.
I don’t think I’ll be able to go away from home without her again, not for more than a day or so, until she’s at least 25. OK…maybe 10. But it will be difficult!
