The Saline Reporter
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
Subtle steps between stages are easy to miss
PUBLISHED: May 1, 2008
An evening not long ago, my 6-year-old daughter demanded I stop staring at her.
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"Dad," she said, cocking her head and sending me a piercing gaze, "stop staring at me."
I blinked and smiled and said, "I wasn't staring."
"You were, too," she said. "Don't do that. It creeps me out."
"OK," I said.
There was no point in explaining to her that I really wasn't staring, which I am aware is rude and makes people uncomfortable. I'm very conscious not to stare, no matter how great the urge.
Staring is studying intensely something that is, and though it may have seemed that I was staring at my daughter as she appeared before me, I was not.
I was seeing her as she will be. I was looking at far more than my 6-year-old daughter standing in her room, wearing sunglasses and pressing a play cell phone to her ear while she sipped water through a straw.
I was having nothing less than a revelation of my daughter as a woman.
She had caught me in a trance, which can look a lot like staring if you're not familiar with the symptoms of augury.
I'm sure a lot of people asked Nostradamus to stop staring, too.
More and more often these days, I have been catching glimpses of the future.
My 11-year-old son will turn his head a certain way or pass through an angle of light or use a word such as "ironically," and a lens to the future will flash open and I can see him as a college freshman. I can see how his chin will be shaped as a young man, how his uncombed hair will fall, how he will hold his shoulders when he walks.
The opening only lasts a moment, but it is a startling vision. You have to quickly seize on it and imprint it in your mind, a process that can easily be mistaken for staring.
So when my daughter asked me to stop staring at her that night, I was actually trying to freeze in my memory banks the foggy snapshot of her at an age around 16. At that moment, I could see how she will tilt her head to prop the phone with her cheek, widen her eyes when a friend shares a piece of juicy gossip, pucker her lips when she is listening intently.
It was eerie and unsettling, if fleeting. It was as if I had been transported 10 years hence and then snapped back after only a second or two.
So I had a good excuse for my wide eyes. What parent doesn't "stare" when they're time travelling?
When I left my daughter to her imaginary phone conversation, sunglasses and warm water, I was struck by a peculiar mixture of emotions.
There was a wisp of sadness. Parents, I concluded, are in a constant state of saying goodbye to our kids.
After 28 days, it's goodbye, newborn. A year later, it's goodbye, infant. Two more years and you say goodbye to your toddler as they ready for preschool. Then it's goodbye to the school age years, and goodbye preteen and, finally, goodbye teenager.
That's a lot of goodbyes, and I felt a little blue at the thought of it.
But I also felt a counterpoint of contentment that took me a while to put my finger on. Unwilling to simply let the emotion pass, like a bloodhound I traced it back to its source.
Underlying my experience as a parent is an abiding sense of my mortality. This is, of course, morbid, and may not be shared by many. But I catch myself worrying at times that I might not get the chance to see my children into adulthood.
There are no guarantees, after all. Life is unsure.
The contentment, I decided, came from a sense that I have seen smidgens of the adults my children will be and there is value in that.
It is a rare moment when parents can witness their children becoming grown. It is generally so gradual and takes place amid the hubbub of day-to-day life that the metamorphosis can seem to happen overnight.
One day a child is 7 years old and the next day she is 17.
Blink, and you'll miss it.
This is why sometimes you have to stare.
Staff Writer Brian Cox can be reached at 429-7380 or by e-mail at bcox@heritage.com.
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