A Pale Blue Dot
That feeling when: You have the chance to really see your children with the perspective of distance.
Not my best artistic rendering, but you know how it is. Life gets busy.
I’m watching our third child engage in his swim lesson. He’s suddenly five. How? When? He was just three! He was just one! He only just arrived on a warm Halloween night, a few weeks old, and let us carry him around his new neighborhood tucked in a blanket against my husband’s shoulder.
But time feels nothing about all the years I believe I missed and here he is: five years old.
He has discovered that he’s now tall enough to stand in the pool with his head above water. It’s a game changer, that moment. I watch him bounce and paddle and grin, then haul himself out to jump off the edge. I smile to myself recognizing that, in spite of how giant he feels, he still barely tops three feet.
The fact of his smallness slaps me suddenly. Time, perhaps not as unfeeling as I thought, does this now and again. It shakes my shoulders and says “I haven’t passed you yet; look at them. They’re weenies.”
So I do and there he is: five years old and the biggest he’s ever been. And there he is: tiny and delicate, his still-baby cheeks puffed wide with a grin, his bright eyes still full of preschooler zest.
Earlier today, we’d engaged in our usual battle of the wills. What was it this time? Had he: a) pushed his older brother into a chair? b) Screamed at me because I wouldn’t allow him to wear thigh-high (on him, ha) baseball socks to school? c) Hidden his dad’s car keys in a secret treasure chest?
Earlier today, he cuddled against me on the couch and told me one of his fantastical stories that involved flying (of course), bears (naturally), and pizza.
Earlier today, I peeked into Reddit thread rabbit holes about supporting young boys’ emotional highs and lows. The trick is: DON’T teach them that emoting is bad but DO teach them that emoting at the top of their lungs is maybe a little bad? And DON’T do it while emoting yourself. But DO model emoting.
This tiny child and his teeny siblings loom so large in my life with their big personalities, big volume, big mess. They take up such sizable portions of my brain, day, and heart. The power struggles? Big. The laughs? Big. The imaginations. SO BIG.
So it hits me hard in moments like this, when someone else is responsible for their safety and I can just watch them, observe, and notice.
Like individual versions of Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot, I can remember them for what they are – tiny, miraculous gatherings of stardust – with the gentle perspective of space.
