Growing Up Is the Saddest Thing of All
It occurred to me today that childhood is the long process of separating from your mother -- first from her body, physically, and then slowly, over many years, emotionally, moving from her life into your own.
I've always listened when parents say the years go by quickly, but I've never heard, not until now, when my older son is taking his first tentative steps away from me. He still loves me desperately, as all young children love their parents, but I've seen in his eyes that we are, for the first time, differentiating. He has always had a strong personality, a list of likes and dislikes as clear and immutable as a stone etching. But he has never felt this separate from me, in a place where I cannot reach, until now.
"Do you want to hear 'Baby Beluga'?" I asked him the other night at bedtime. It was the song I'd sung to him each night for the first three years of his life, one of the few songs my shaky voice could master. The song -- about a wild, free soul -- is as much a part of me as is my own heart, and I will be able to sing it on my deathbed, even if I live to 101.
Is the water warm?
Is your mama home with you so happy?
But when I offered to sing it again, this time to an older boy, he just stared.
"What's 'Baby Beluga'?" he asked.
Those moments I spent, holding him, freshly bathed, slowly rocking him on my lap until his eyes fluttered closed, those moments for him have gone, to wherever memories go in a child's mind when room must be made for other experiences, for memories without their parents.
The realization might have made me sad, the understanding that he's drifting away, further each day, from the time when we were so linked, he and I. But it didn't. I'm eager to see the product of his transformation. Both of my children appear anew to me each day, and they amaze me with what they learn and think, the ways they show themselves to be so like me and yet so different.
I am a partner in those discoveries, but more a silent one now, watchful, doing little of note other than trying not to erect obstacles. My role in the performance of their childhood will be more important than most others, but now I see the curtain call, and the goal: a person who can stand by, and with, himself.
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