How to make a working mom feel like crap.

My son knows exactly how to buy me a ticket to a Guilt Trip, First Class.

Until recently, we had no problem with the morning day-care drop-off. (OK, that's not exactly true: the first month was HELL, but that was back in September. ) We based this delusion on the fact that Cami would run to the toys and books, and begin playing. He'd even sometimes point to the door and wave "bye-bye" to us.

Well, the first rule of parenting is "Never get too comfortable." Our Golden Age of daycare drop-offs ended about 3 weeks ago. Now, as soon as we make a move toward the door, Cami begins screaming bloody murder.

My husband, who has been doing the drop-offs, told me about this new phenomenon, but I didn't quite grasp the implications. (I was choosing to forget those days in September, when I would walk to the car in tears, and Nima, off on a business trip, didn't "get it.")

This morning, I took Cami to daycare. All was fine--despite his insistence on having his binky and lovies, and on my reading him the same book three times--until I told him I had to go to work. He began crying and hurled himself across my lap. As I disengaged him and slunk out of the room, telling them that I loved him and would see him at 5, he began shrieking.

All I could think of is the email Nima sent me after his first day care drop off, back in September:

Let me just say, that regardless whether you're a mom or a dad, until you drop your child off in a foreign place and watch his eyes swell up with tears and the piercing shriek of his discontent fill the hallways out to the roadside, you do not know misery.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. I suck.