The most mystical part of parenting is this passage of time, the way children accumulate years to their very person, like geological layers. I’m always so blindsided: “What? Another birthday?” because, although parenting keeps getting better – it truly does – I’ve also felt, about 300 times this past year: This place is good. I could stop and rest here awhile.
But that will never be. The children are always inching forward, becoming more of who they are, while urging their parents, like small zen masters, to get with the warp-speed program of impermanence.
This is all on my mind because Col turned 9 last week. Nine is one of those ages that just two years ago felt like the other side of the world. A place where children become unrecognizable, startling versions of their former selves, where characteristics I couldn’t bear to part with get tossed to a distant sea.
But, of course, it’s not like that. Thankfully, the daily pace is slow enough that each chaotic, loud hour leads to the next in the string of regular life, moving systematically to places like 9. These childhoods can move like a conveyor belt unspooling so slowly you barely notice. Except, these days I do. Only because of where I’ve been. Nine years ago, I cuddled a blue-eyed baby; nine years from now, a man-child will leave home. A whisper of truth circles when Rose climbs in my lap. It says: Today these legs are yours for the squeezing, someday not. Everything feels time-sensitive, the definition of which is: only relevant or applicable for a short period of time.
Col, at 9, wears a watch and checks it periodically, like he’s got somewhere to be. He creates art everyday, sketching airplanes and ships, and I wish I had a way to tell him to hold fast to this always. He whistles continuously, loudly, in a way that could grate on you if you forgot the simple, lucky truth that it means he is here.
Col’s shelf is covered with tools and experiments. Some are sludged with sediment or choked with seeds, some glow with the bright red of dissolving cough drops. Col is so much of what I’m not, I am compelled to leave him a wide berth to be himself, while I observe like an anthropologist in a foreign village. (He just poured a glass of water down the sink, watching, quietly and rapt, its pattern of draining.)
His kindness challenges me to be kinder. When Col spontaneously decided to donate half his Maria’s Bookshop gift certificate to his sister, my heart gasped, first in protest: you don’t have to, honey! And then in relief, for getting out of my own way to let kindness be. Col is quiet and thoughtful and has already mastered what the Buddhists say is the path to enlightenment: having few preferences. When selecting a family DVD, Col and Dan are conspicuously quiet while Rose and I opine passionately.
Col seems to have miraculously outrun his preemie past. Only 20 percent of babies born at 25 weeks have no lasting problems. I don’t even know what constitutes a lasting problem anymore. (Two doctors have joined his pediatric office in the past couple years, and we haven’t even met them. Used to be, we’d show up regularly, balancing an oxygen tank, prescriptions for inhaled steroids and my own worried heart).
All that remains is Col has an unusually great need for snuggles. Perhaps he’s making up for those first four months sleeping alone in the NICU, skin like parchment under a sprawl of tubes and wires, hulking machines crowded around his incubator, saving his life continuously. One mile away, I would pray, deep in the night, in the only way I knew how: Please let him be okay.
Reach Rachel Turiel at sanjuandrive@frontier.net.Visit her blog, 6512 and growing, on raising children, chickens and other messy, rewarding endeavors at 6,512 feet.
