“Are we not like two volumes of one book?”
~Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Working from home has afforded me with the luxury of observing my children’s evolution up close, watching them grow to sapling from seed in bits and starts, never quite knowing whether a particular behavior is endangered or simply getting started. The inevitable minutes that will one day end up missing from my memory will slip away due to the detritus of old age, not because I was absent or too careless to pay attention.
Like any parent, I observe things about my children that I could not be more proud of, often chasing or trailing some other thing I wish they did better. There are habits I long to break, flaws I wish to iron, and character traits I wish to strengthen.
My son talks endlessly – a million miles a minute with rarely a breath between laps. He can talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk, and no matter how much I love the storyteller spinning inside him, sometimes it’s just TOO MUCH. I long for the quiet and have several times slipped into the bathroom in search of a few scant seconds of solitude only to hear the tip tip tap upon the door as his story continues to unfold. He is a Tommy Gun spattering blasts of verbiage that rarely cease whether invited or not. Just like his father.
My daughter will do anything for a laugh, even when her humor is hinging on the wrong side of obnoxious. She will rudely slice into the conversation of others without a second thought so long as it tilts the spotlight in her direction. When not receiving the attention she feels she deserves, my daughter will turn up the dial, assuming the problem is her volume and rarely accepting the suggestion that perhaps the reason no one is laughing is because she isn’t being all that funny. Just like her father.
My son will sometimes fall into the seemingly endless loop of a semi-eternal thought, as though frightened of its release. He will repeat the same question over and over, hurtling past learning until he lands in the lands of reassurance. He will parrot his own thoughts with enough fortitude to make you half believe an army of repetition can wage a war powerful enough to twist imagination to truth. Just like his mother.
My daughter gets feisty when things don’t go her way, her fingers curving to tight commas nested inside her palms. A fierce determination will wash her face like the moon settling in front of the sun. She is willing to fight for what she believes to be right no matter how shaky her footing, and willing to battle even when no fight is required. Just like her mother.
My son sometimes pouts when he does not get his way. He will purse his lips and cast his eyes downward, revealing with a quick stroke of his chin the precision of his injury; a wordless manipulation to let those who love him most know his needs have not been met. I look at him with an inferno of conflicting desires – one to satisfy what I otherwise am not and the other to put the manipulation in its place. I cannot help but feel certain he knows exactly what he is doing. Just like his father.
My daughter is a sometimes slob, allowing appetite to consume her with the same ferocity that drives her to shovel food into her mouth as though she were the new puppy in an overcrowded kennel. Unwilling to take a breath, too busy inhaling; the sight is embarrassing beyond measure. I would wonder if she eats this way when we’re not around, but of course she does. Just like her father.
Like it or not, our children are fractured reflections of us, and we have but a fraction of their years to give them our best. We must highlight the best inside us, and do all we can to rinse the worst. In those inevitable moments when we look at our children and see something we do not wish to see, it is often all too easy to look beyond our own borders to find the root of the problem. More often than not, those roots are right beneath our feet.
Writer Dad
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