"Mommy, do you love me?"

Such a sweet and innocent question coming from the mouth of a 3.5 year old. My normal answer would be "of course I love you, silly head!!". But this was different. This wasn't an out of the blue question. This was something more. This question followed an episode that I will call "not my most shining mommy moment".

It was a long day, we'd been couped up in the house for the 2nd day in a row (3rd day for Matthew). While it was a snow-day, I did have to work from home. That is a hard concept for Matthew to grasp sometimes. He's used to the routine e-mail checks, no biggie. But this was a files spread across the table, notes everywhere, mommy might lose it kind of day. It didn't help that Anthony only took a 40 minute morning nap before being woken up by the snow-blower that hubby decided to start under his bedroom during naptime. You see where I'm going with this??

Anyway, the natives were getting restless, and all I wanted was to finish ONE work related task. And all I could hear was "mommy, come on mommy. Mommy come ON!! Mommmmmmyyyyyyy!!!!". And I lost it. I yelled. Loud. I scared both of my children. And felt like dirt...worse than that, but I won't swear here (unlike real life...ha!). I spent the next half hour snuggling and calming both of them...soothing their cries, the cries that linger long after the tears stop flowing...you know the ones. Anthony went about his day rather quickly. But Matthew...Matthew took a while. I felt awful. I sat next to him on our bed for a while. Hugged him, kissed him, and apologized. Because sometimes even mommies need to apologize. It's not nice to yell, he told me. I know baby, I'm sorry. And then, about 30 minutes later...

"Mommy, do you love me?". Oh my goodness do I ever. I would move mountains, I would walk through fire. I would give you my last breath so that you could breathe. God do I love you! But sometimes mommies make mistakes. They get frustrated. They forget to use their words...sometimes they need a time out. Today was one of those days. This mommy needed a time out...I needed to stop what I was doing for 10 minutes to listen to my boy...to lay down next to him as he watched "Kris Kringle", to say to myself: work can wait, he cannot. It just goes to show, no matter how much we say "I love you" (and we say it often in this family), no matter how many hugs and buzi's (Polish for kiss) we give, it takes one off moment for a child to question our love for them. Not a great feeling as a mom, very humbling...but I suppose we all need to be humbled every once in a while.