Just Out of Reach

Childhood is the place where we grow from. Just like anyone who has gone to school feels like they are an expert on teaching school, I think we probably all feel like we are experts on childhood to some extent.

For some, raising kids is an opportunity to re-visit the fun aspects of a happy childhood, for others it is a way to make peace with a troubled one. Still others don't have the option or decide that they would prefer to not return.

My experience of parenting so far has been several moments of amazement and wonder strung far apart on a string of times when I was left grasping for what was and what will be. I get prompted by Facebook to think back 3-4-5 years on a daily basis and I am left feeling breathless with loss. There is my little one when she still wanted to go to the library with me; there she is still content to play school in our living room, yet another image of her masterpiece she wrote her first week of school.

For what seemed like an endless series of weekends, my daughter begged me to “play school” with her. I had filled my own childhood with days on end of school day after school day in the basement where I fulfilled the teacher role and the occasional drop in by grouchy principle and I envisioned a class of unruly students. My mother reported that she found out what was going on at real school by listening in on these daily sessions. However, for my daughter it was different. She would ask me to make a list of things to cover in the lesson, math, gym, music, art, French, reading, writing, and then she asked me to be the teacher so she could be the student. It consumed me with angst at times because I was often too weary to stand up let alone play school. Yet, I felt the grinding pressure that her childhood was fleeting and needed to be responded to. Eventually, her requests to play school spread apart. Was it because she sensed my reluctance? Or because she outgrew the urge to play a student as studies became more consuming at actual school?

Whichever the answer is, we don’t play school anymore. Those days are past. She starts telling me about what she plans to study at university. I am left once again reaching out for what was and wondering who she will be. Once again, I am having a hard time staying here with her in this moment as she boards the next leg of the journey.

As I see her teetering on the edge between childhood and adolescence, I feel like there will be so many versions of the child I know and understand. The baby she was is gone. The toddler and pre-schooler also have disappeared, but she keeps being replaced by a richer concentration of herself. I cannot miss the her I know right now or last year too much because I know she will reappear as someone I will love even more.

I look back at my childhood and think; I disappeared only to re-appear year after year. I was oblivious to my own parents’ grief as each phase was outmanoeuvered by a more present one.

What I also fail to take into consideration is my own growing apart from what was and will be. Who will I become? How will I deepen and change, knowing all this is just out of reach until it is time to say hello to the her I will become.