Time in a bottle

There is nothing in me so fear-inducing as the thought of some day losing one of my children before my own time.  Similarly, my wife, with both of our boys, has exhibited an ineluctable biological urge to ensure that they are breathing at all times of the day when not in direct line of sight.  Between the baby monitor, uncanny hearing, and a husband who's become rather adept at interpreting the "my hands are full, you'd best go check and see if Tavish is breathing" sort of looks, the preventive measures are stacked in our favour.

Can't really do much about those things completely out of our control.  And, as a parent, one of the worst things to do is try to control those.  Serenity comes into play here.

Over the past while this relative helplessness has been driven home.  A friend of my brother lost her infant unexpectedly a couple months ago.  One of my co-workers was away for two days last week; he attended the funeral of his three month-old grandson.  Another co-worker has a toddler just two months older than my own, diagnosed with Leigh's Syndrome; he and his wife have been steeling themselves for his loss ever since the birth.  I'm also good friends with a couple who had to deal with losing in utero.  I can't imagine.

These were some of the thoughts drifting through my head this past Saturday as Declan and I swayed back and forth in the ham-meek in our backyard.  Amy was playing with the boy outside in the swing and then came in the house to tag me in while she put Tavish down for a nap.  I grabbed a big yellow plastic cup of ice water and walked out to where Dex had lost most of his momentum, kicking listlessly at some of the taller blades of grass.  I pulled him out and plopped us down in the hammock, kicked off against the bricks of the fire pit and watched with intense amusement as Declan tried to reconcile the heavy cup of water with the unstable seat in the yellow mesh, made worse by our swinging back and forth.  He did quite well.

We spent the next five minutes making note of such things as the fact that the cup and the hammock were the same colour and that the trees surrounding us were green.  Beside us was a pile of wood and the two plastic chairs on the other side of the fire pit too were green.  There were boobies to be heard in the air somewhere beyond the concealing leaves and one of them sounded quite like a crow.  A butterfly flitted past.  Orange!  We waved in annoyance at a few mosquitoes looking for a meal.  Declan stuck an entire grubby hand into the cup for a moment, drew it out, looked at it, looked at me and said, "Wet."  Then he did it again with the other hand.  Surprisingly, it also got very wet.

He lost his balance taking a drink, leaned too far backwards and spilt half of the cup plus a couple ice cubes over his shirt and down his chest.  "Cold!" he asserted.

I convinced him to let me have a few sips from the cup and then I leaned over and placed it on the edge of the fire pit.  He wanted to snuggle.  So we swayed and snuggled and I wrapped the yellow mesh of the ham-meek around us like a fish-net cocoon, clasped closed by my one hand, the other wrapped securely around my son, his head nestled in the crook of my neck.  He poked his fingers through the cocoon to test the air outside our haven against whose influences we were, for a brief time, inviolate.

Then he wanted out.

I heaved the two of us out of the hammock and Declan took great delight in helping me feed each of the dogs one of the dwindling ice cubes from the yellow plastic cup retrieved from the edge of the fire pit.  The two panting puppies gobbled them up and drooled for more.  Dex thought them completely hilarious and ran after them all over the yard, shouting and flailing his arms, "FAHVEEE!!  GEEKOH!!" 

I stood up from where I was hunkered by the bricks of the fire pit and went to get more ice water.

I wish there were some more permanent way to preserve those moments that seem to hang suspended outside the more mundane hustle of the rest of my days.  They are incredibly precious to me.

Comments

[marian]

It's awful to have so much to lose, isn't it? As they grow up, a major skill is learning to go to sleep when you don't know where they are. I'm able to do it now, after a few years of training. But when I hear him come home, if I hear it, it's like everything in me lets down and I realize that I hadn't been relaxed until I heard his footsteps downstairs. Eventually I'll be past this stage too, I suppose.

I used to think one couldn't possibly love an adult child the way one loves a cuddly baby, but now I find that if anything it's even worse. Or better. Better-worse. You have to let go with both hands and find a way to live with it.

[Dixie]

Great post. This parenting thing is a pretty consuming thing. It gives you everything -- gain, loss, pleasure and pain, love and total blue-in-the-face frustration. It really just gives you life in all of its fullness. But sometimes it's hard to grasp it all -- thank goodness for those fleeting moments that stand still sometimes.

[Mark]

We'll never be responsible for anything more important than human life. (We might be the only ones rearing intelligent beings in the entire universe). Forms of entertainment that depict a parent losing a child mean much more to me now than before I had my own.

I would never want to suggest that one person is more important than another, but as parents, we have a weight on us that a non-parent can never know, as well as joy they can never hope to comprehend. (I'm not talking only biological parents here, so all you guardians and adopters and foster parents, don't get all uproarish. Still, though, I would argue that the happiness quotient is higher for the bio's.)

[E-Belle]

Ah, Jim Croce. You know what, Simon, my father used to play that song on the guitar all the time when I was a little girl and I get verklempt every time I hear it. Parents aren't the only ones who wish they could better preserve and relive some memories. Sometimes their children do, too. You ask Dex and Tavish in a few decades. They'll be here. And probably be here long enough to worry about losing YOU before THEY'RE ready. Which will be never.

[Linda]

At least you wrote it and can re-live it every time you read it. And save it for the boys later. I have some journals from when the kids were little which I cherish but I wish I had chronicled way more than I did.
This was one of my many favorite posts of yours...