Guardians of Grail

cheapbag214s · Posted: Wed 2:11, 14 Aug 2013 Post subject: I finally get it

I finally get it,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]
Maybe every third day I wake up to someone sitting on the edge of my bed with a form in one hand,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], my wallet in the other and never,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], ever a pen. This is what I do. Sign things. Cycling camps, soccer photos, death warrants,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], affidavits applauding their last serial murder before term two school holidays. As if you ever had any. That much you know. Because you learned long ago that this whole thing - this pot roast-sized baby who turned into a glimpse of forehead in a Harry Potter book, who turned into a dishtowel snapper on three,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], then two,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and soon enough four wheels - is not yours to hold at all. It has taken 13 or 16 years to get it. They never were.
Now when he unfolds beside you like a question mark waiting for a backrub, his feet extending beyond yours,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], his abandoned babyhood belongs to another solar system in another matrix, somewhere between The Simpsons and platform 9¾.
You tell yourself you'll remember this time,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], but you don't.
Only rarely, when you least expect it, as you bend down to gather up the dead pile of yesterday's newspapers, you catch one glimpse and truly see. My daughter's profile when she piles her hair up against the wall as we talk on her bed. The stretch of her neck as the study light throws it in relief.
Your son's hockey feet sticking out at 90 degrees. His newly stretched legs on a stick insect frame that seems to float down the hall, propelled along like walking graffiti strokes. There are on-purpose steps too. Those involve food or leaving.
You tell her, when you carried her, it never occurred to you what she would look like. What you wondered most was the first time you would ever hear her voice. And now you know. That you listen to the way she hums when slouched over her homework in a messy pile at the kitchen table. That you wish you could have written down his repartee in the car after practice when the windshield wipers gave it cadence he didn't notice.
As new parents, we enshrine early childhood under a snow globe. But these years melt into your DNA unsung.
You hardly notice how much you value the peace of having one of them still want to face-plant themselves beside you in your bed, the teen equivalent of "pet me,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], I'm back - for now".
You don't really remember when you stopped taking pictures as much. When the lens somehow got wider, moving from close-ups of toddler faces with outstretched arms flying in pillow case wings,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], to distant wide shots of prize giving.
They take the pictures now, posing with their friends with the kind of abandon you only see like headlights receding smaller into the possibilities of the night ahead.
Things are due; their life is a litany of future tense. Peer support,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Duke of Edinburgh,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Youth UN,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], orienteering, the Teletubby party costume to figure out, Saturday's race, another sleepover, two essays, an internal. Totally invisible to them,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], you wonder how the naked look of promise could ever get bigger.
You have no idea why they bronze baby shoes, because the mangy, giant sneakers in a pile by the door say so much more. Not who they will be, but who they are becoming.
They have no idea you were another person when they were small. What they can't yet see is that you have both grown up,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych].
What you can't tell them now is that you will always see them with more unfinished beauty, more uncontained perfection that isn't anywhere near perfect, than any lover will over a lifetime. That you see them clearer than they see themselves. At least that is a parent's last conceit.
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