finding a childhood...

the sunlight was broad and fierce this morning on the wide white sheen of snow covering the lawn outside Jaelyn's kindergarten. I carried Addison down the sidewalk next to it.

"Don't step in that, Daddy."

He pointed at the clean clear slate of cold white perfection.

"Right." I said, with my best socializer / moralizer tone, "We only walk in the snow if we're wearing boots, because otherwise we're going to get our feet wet and get cold and maybe even get sick."

(Ahh the slippery slope that parenting justifies....)

"No!" he insists. "Don't step in that else it won't be pretty anymore."



I was astonished. How did he know how important clean snow was? How monumental first footprints were? The shock of great beauty that came with a field of snow? Do we know everything at four that we need to about aesthetics?

....

I stand in the hallway of my house in the middle of the night two nights ago. Everything is bright and shiny just before I continue my bedtime ritual:

(already) brushed my teeth
(next I'll) sneak into each kids room and put my hand gently on their chest and feel the gentle movement of their heart and breath; gaze at the dark indiscernible mass of curls on their pillows.

and i notice that there's something different about the light. What is it?

It's the moonlight on the snow. It lights up the house from the underbelly. The darkness is still thick, but it has an odd shininess to it.

I don't know why, but good light always evokes gratefulness in me.

I am shockingly grateful for my children in this moonlight.

....

As I climb into my bed, I think about what it is like to have the life of Jaelyn and Addison. I wonder what the mistakes I am making right now are. I long to make a perfect world for them. I'm surprised at how little of the daily living that I remember from these years.

My father claims to remember none of his childhood. He has an astonishing memory for estoeria and very little recollection of anything quotidian. He laughs at this vague fulginous past every time I press him for details about his childhood. I am astonished that he can remember *less* than I can.

I'm convinced that everything that ever happened, happened then, and yet so much of it lives only in feelings and hints and intuitions. So little is concrete or recollectable.

and then, as I spoon already sleeping Lynn, guilty that her skin is so warm, mine is so cold, but sure that she likes the touch anyway, I realize:

We dont have childhood at all! It happens to us, but then we only realize it when we encounter children later or return to places and impressions that have no referrent here in the now.

Our children's childhood is our own childhood. Our first childhood. Our only way of knowing the world at all.

And not just our biological or adopted children, but our connections with any of these smaller versions of Who We Were...

.....

Sometimes I feel precious and sentimental and schmaltzy for posting so many stories about my kids, but I'm just astonished by them. I can't help myself. The clean sheen of their newfallen-ness teaches me everything....