EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
KID
QUIPS
During last July’s 5.8 earthquake, 3-year-old Bronwyn told her 1-year-old sister, “We’re going for a wiggle.” READ MORE
Fatherhood
|
||||
|
Sometimes I wake up from a dream, or a nightmare I suppose, that I am in grammar school and that my work is due. After a few seconds’ consideration of how I will possibly get this work done (after all, I have a job, a wife, a child!), I realize that the dream was just a dream and that, at least until my entire life is outsourced, I do not have to go to school anymore. My next thought, however, is equally troubling, in a vicarious way: The time is coming near when the shapes-and-colors fun of my 4-year-old son’s nursery school career gives way to real education with real homework. I don’t know if he’s ready for all that, but I most certainly know that I am not. When my son was a baby, his babyhood felt less like a fast-passing developmental stage than a geological epoch. I watched every moment I could laughed through half of them, fretted through the rest and admired what at the moment seemed his lack of haste. If I backed up, I could see that he was changing fast, but I tended to watch from close in, from perspectives of crib-side at 1 a.m. and crib-side at 2. It seemed like each night would last forever, and if a night can last forever, it seems a good bet that an entire childhood won’t rush by. What I was doing, I suppose, was dipping my toes in denial. I think I’m not alone in this. The baby months drive us a bit mad, but it’s a gentle madness, so consuming that we trick ourselves into believing there can be nothing ahead but an endless string of such months. Even when it’s quite efficient to state our children’s ages in years, we still express them in lunar cycles, filling playgrounds with 27-month-olds and 32-month-olds as we wean ourselves from the idea that our baby is a baby. Now my son is making baskets on a full-height hoop, kicking a soccer ball with wall-denting force, and seriously considering joining a rock band. Only now do I realize how bloody fast the blessed early days passed. Even days that weren’t all that long ago suddenly feel ancient: the month or so when he replaced all of his “L’s” with “N’s” “Achoo!” “Bness you!” the brilliant weeks when he crossed parking lots calling out the make of each car. One day last spring I was changing the hallway air filter and he exclaimed, “Ooh, ooh, you gonna cnimb that nadder?” It’s hard to believe I won’t be hearing that again. They tell me, though, that I’ll hear new things. I’ll be listening. Greg Blake Miller writes from Las Vegas. For our Letters department: ocfamily.com |
||||
RSS Subscribe
Digg This ArticleSEARCH THE SITE
