“Baby Yoda left,” my older son told me as I was tucking him in. He was referring to our Baby Yoda Tamagotchi, which eventually leaves with the Mandalorian if you take good care of him.

“Oh?” I said.

“Yeah, I looked to see how Baby Yoda was feeling and he was gone. And I was like, Oh, that’s how he’s feeling,” he said.

“Mmmm, well, you know something?” I whispered to him. “That’s how it feels to me with you.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t three days with me,” he argued.

A brief conversation then ensued in which he tried to argue logically that it couldn’t possibly feel that way and while I agreed that yes, literally, that wasn’t true – metaphorically? Metaphorically, it was so damn true. Three days, nine, almost ten years? Same difference.

Sitting in a diner a couple weeks later, Mr. Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan came on. Suddenly I was transported back to my porch nearly 10 years ago. My older son was only a couple months old, at most. He was in his stroller, which was still in reasonable shape back then, before it was stained with spilled tea and ripped from dragging it places and God knows what else. He was crying. And crying. And crying. He cried a lot in those early months. And I was never one of those moms who could understand their babies’ cries (can people really do that or are they fibbing?) so I would just spin the roulette wheel of what might work that time. In desperation, I (or maybe my husband?) turned on music. Mr. Tambourine Man. And my son stopped crying. Miraculous. These days, his music tastes run more to the video game soundtrack side, but that memory stays fresh, seemingly just yesterday.

These moments are everywhere.

When he exclaims “Squirrel!”, pointing out his beloved fuzzy mammals, I see reflections of that day as a baby his tiny hands firmly grasped a spiky seed, the first thing he refused to let us take from him. When I tuck him in at night and rub his head, I remember gently placing him in his crib when he had finally fallen asleep, holding my breath that he wouldn’t wake up. When I see him maneuvering through expert-level Mario Maker courses on the Switch, a flicker of that first time he played the original Mario and ran into the first enemy at least 30 times flashes across my mind. When he pumps his pedals up a hill biking to school, I think of him falling over again and again on the local basketball court, then getting back up, determined to master that bike.

All of those memories right there, always there in my mind.

Maybe not three days, my dear. But close enough.