Las Vegas mom Mary Harper anticipated tears on her 3-year-old son Isaiah’s first day of preschool. But she didn’t expect they would be coming from her husband, Samajee Harper.
“I don’t think I’d even seen him cry before!” Mary, a kindergarten teacher, tells TODAY.com.
In a now-viral TikTok video, Mary, 28, can’t stop laughing as a weeping Samajee “Sam” sniffles and wipes at his eyes.
“I thought I was gonna be cool, bruh,” Sam says, his voice cracking with emotion. He notes that the hardest part was when Isaiah “looked back” at him after they said goodbye.
"I was crying, but then my husband started crying so hard that it made me laugh," Mary wrote on the clip.
Mary tells TODAY.com that she was grateful for the comic relief, as she, too, was bawling when they got in the car.
“Everything was fine until I said, ‘Isaiah, Mommy and Daddy are leaving now,’” she recalls. “And that’s when he gives us the saddest face I’ve ever seen in my life. Then he starts crying those silent tears.”
At that point, Mary says she “fell apart.”
“I’m crying and hugging him, and expecting my husband to be like, ‘Girl, get it together, let’s go,’ but I looked over and his eyes are bloodshot,’” she says.
On their way out, Mary and Sam peeked at Isaiah through a little window.
“His teacher was holding him and consoling him, so I felt a million times better, but Sam, not so much,” she says. “He kept going, ‘I’m not OK. I’m not OK.’ It was so sad, but also hilarious.”
It’s been four weeks since Isaiah started preschool, and Mary says drop-offs are now free of tears.
“It was just that first day,” she says. “Now we’re all good — even Sam."
Mary's TikTok video was flooded with comments from parents who have been there.
"Why is this me and my husband last fall when we dropped our son off at college," one person wrote.
Added another, "We all thought we were gonna be cool and we all bawled in the car."