My son is righteously pissed at me.  I had the temerity, the sheer unmitigated GALL, to go on a business trip without him.  On the same week that he started at daycare.  I am now, in his estimation, a Bad Mommy.

We didn’t really plan it that way.  But my husband’s part-time return to the working world just happened to coincide with a site visit to one of my animal labs.  The visit was unavoidable.  It’s part of my job.  However, the only economics Harry understands at this age is how much of his dinner he has to eat to get cookies afterward, and his grasp on that is a bit tenuous. 

Now, he understands I have to go to work each day, and that I come home every night.  He sends me off in the morning with sugars and bye-by waves.  He greets me at night with little spinning dances and happy smiles.  But, in HIS version of the social contract, I have reneged on a few parts of the deal.

1.  While I am gone, he gets free reign of the house, his toys and cookies.

2.  I come home, if not promptly at 6:30 pm, then shortly enough thereafter to give him his dinner, his bath and a game of tag, and a video or book. 

3.  I am there when he wakes up in the morning, to give him kisses, breakfast bars, bananas and milk.  Mostly kisses.

4.  I am NOT, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, to leave him with a roomful of strange children who share toys (SHARE? TOYS? BLASPHEMY, I TELL YOU!) and run off for a fun-filled three days of horse pee and paperwork.  Just what kind of mother are you anyway?

Therefore, with our mother-son compact broken irrevocably on my part, he is under no obligation whatsoever to greet me with kisses, dances, or, for that matter, even civility.  “How could you?” stares, head turning, and flat-out tantrums are the only just punishment for oathbreakers.  I am a pariah.  Just hand out the cookies and go sit in your chair, if-you-please.

The prodigal mother has returned, and nobody is throwing any parties.