It’s 8:30pm, and I am forehead to forehead with an eight year old boy that thinks he should still be up watching a basketball game. It is a Monday night, and he has school tomorrow, and he thinks that he has the right to stay up as long as he possible can.
He would be wrong in his assumption.
He also thinks that sugar is an adequate menu item for any meal, and that walking by a sink is the equivalent of washing his hands. Thinking of doing something is not the same as doing it. Same goes for flushing the toilet.
I didn’t say he was the smartest kid on the block, but he makes up for it in cunningness and rationalization
We are laying in his bed, talking about what he has to do to become an astronaut, his career choice this week. Tomorrow for school, he will have to dress as his future self, and this week (as with many to be honest) his future self lives in space.
He doesn’t quite understand what someone that is in a rocket orbiting the Earth would need to know that much math, but I am trying to make this a learning moment of the importance of studying hard in school He is trying to make this into a learning moment of why we should ride more roller coasters.
I see his point.
I am not disillusioned as to what is going on here, nor am I unaware of the moment. I know that there are millions of parents around the world that would give anything to be right where I am with their own child, the one (or ones) that are older now and no longer needing to be tucked in. Or more sadly, the parents that had a child, and no longer do.
I have read the posts and the poems. I know the breaking of the hearts that parents have when they look back and no longer have their “little babies”.
Kids spend a lifetime trying to get out of the shadow of their parents, not realizing that parents spend a lifetime growing their own branches to provide shade to protect their children from the sun. Kids don’t realize all that we parents do for them, but conversely, we parents don’t always realize all that our children do for us, until it is too late.
My present is someone else’s past, and their past is a memory that makes them cry. Sometimes my present makes me cry when I think that one day this present will also be a past, and that my child will no longer want to lay in a bed and talk about the wonderful things that little ones talk about. One day, my little one will not want to lay in bed with me and tell me about the stars, and sadly I will be in my own bed looking up at those same stars, wishing upon them he still would.
I am still one of the lucky ones. I am still one of the people who’s child still reaches out to hold my hand for no reason. I am more than happy to lay on a couch and watch tv with a small wiggle worm that doesn’t understand the meaning of staying still, and I am still more than happy to give piggy back rides to a small child that can easily walk on his own two feet.
Tonight my kid doesn’t want me to leave. He wants to talk and chat and just be loved. And for the longest time I will oblige his request, until I no longer can, and then I will sneak out of his room as he sneaks out of this realm and into another, one that I could only wish I could join him in.
The beauty of a moment like this is I know how painful it is. That we all know there will be a last time for everything we take for granted now. We just don’t know when that last time is, because if we did, we would certainly never let it end. But in the end, there will always be one last memory of something, and that is the one we most certainly hope we can remember.
Who knows, my small child will one day be a big child, and have one last moment of something himself. The last time he plays a sport, the last day of high school. Maybe he will get a small glimpse of the painful part of being a parent, of seeing something you cherish now become a part of the past. Maybe he will finally understand why I hug him so much now, because I may not get to later.
And hopefully in that moment, he will reach out his hand and want to hold mine again.
My baby sleeps, and when he wakes, he will be none the wiser of the thoughts that go through my head, the ones of him growing up and growing old. Children are sweet, but they are truly capable of ripping our hearts out of our chests, not out of meanness or hatred, but merely being the beautiful creatures they are.
One does not cry unless one has seen sadness, and one has not lived if they haven’t experienced loss.
Children live in this magical world, and it is our job to protect that world as long as we can, until they are able to be the hero of their own making. But for now, I am the hero of this pretend world because I can do feats of strength, and my child thinks I can move the world. Little do they understand that we parents will move the heavens and Earth for them, and perhaps this too adds to the sadness, that we parents miss being heroes to someone that looks up to us.
And until that day when my child is no longer a child, I will play the hero, I will be the cuddle monster, and I will be the encyclopedia that feeds the mind of this future astronaut.
For me, the greatest thing I did today was to tell a little boy how man traveled to the moon and is trying to go to Mars next. And who knows, maybe one day he will be one of the first people to travel to Mars or some other celestial place. But for right now, he is asleep, dreaming of that day, and I will soon go to sleep myself, hoping that this isn’t the last time he lets me dream a little dream with him.
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