Sadness and Love

The other night I was putting the girls to bed and I was singing them a song I had made up. I sang about how cute and sweet they are and how much I love them. Then I added a line about how sad I'd be if they ever went away. Nina asked me to keep singing to her, so I did. After a few minutes, she looked over at me with her eyes full of tears and her face about to crumple. I stopped singing and asked what she was feeling. She said, "When you sang about how sad you'd be if we went away, it made me so sad. Why did it make me so sad?"

We talked about how sometimes when we love someone so much, it makes us sad to think about not being together. We also talked about the fact that we don't cry just when we are sad but sometimes we even cry when we are happy or because we love someone so much.

This kid is getting so big and she asks these questions that are difficult even for grown ups to understand. All I can do is look on with love (and usually with tears in my eyes), answer her questions as best as I can, and hope that she never questions how much I love her.