It happened in a blink of an eye. A split second. A moment in time. I felt Willow slipping away. My daughter, all 10 months of her, was playing across the room with a boy named Max. The two were handing balls back and forth to each other, and after the boy named Max gave Willow a green ball, he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. Yep, the big smooch-a-roo. Right on the cheek. Right in front of me. Willow's first kiss. The kiss caught the boy named Max's mom by surprise too: "Ah, he kissed her!" She thought it was cute!* I, however, had not-so-adorable feelings about the, er, encounter. The boy named Max is two weeks shy of a year old. He's the older man, the college kid nipping at my innocent girl's vulnerabilities. I don't like the boy named Max, and his pompous moves. Max is robbing my Willow from the crib, right from under my nose. And I'm sure he's thinking about just plucking her from my grasp and putting her in the trophy ...
A father's journey to finding the right words.