Being young, single, and rather
non-maternal, you wouldn’t think I spend a lot of time thinking about my future
children. And I don’t, really. I spend more of my prodigious imagination
(and yes, I think I am allowed to call it prodigious, knowing exactly how many
novels and stories I’ve come up with) dreaming about the boy who will be the
father of said children, and not just because of his potential as a father,
either. No—I have other plans for him
first.
But I was reading something today
that made me wonder about the differences between generations, and especially
the difference between my generation and the next. In a short story entitled "Arcadia", Frederick Reiken pays tribute
to his four-year-old daughter, to how much he loves her and what he wants to
give to her. One of the things he
addresses is how very little of his own life she will know about or
understand. “All this,” he says, “for her,
is insubstantial; for me, it’s history.”
This struck me with some
force. It made me realize that in ten
years or so when I do have children, the things that happened to me to make me
who I am at that point, will mean very little to them. They will know only that I am there in front
of them, that I can and wish to take care of them and love them. These very days in which I live right now may
never be known to them.
It also makes me think of just how
much I don’t know about my parents’ lives.
So much of what I know of their pasts—in the “dark days” before they had
me, of course—I think of in terms of who they are now. My mother is a dentist, for which degree she
spent time in Mexico and Dallas, worked in an office in Williamson, then got
her own practice in Galax. My father
used to be a hospital administrator, and he ran the hospital where I was born,
but he gave that up so that he could raise my siblings and me. It’s a very backwards way to think about a
life, and a very selfish one, now that I think of it. But we can’t really help it. For so long, our only knowledge of our parents
were how their lives converged into our own, and thereafter how they connect
with ours.
It’s strange to me, to think of how
long it may be before I can look into my children’s eyes as equals. Everything around me now feels so real—the sunlight
on the leaves outside, the breeze from the fan behind me, my hair in its
untended curls around my head, the music playing a bit too loud from my
speakers, the remaining taste of the strawberry dacquiri I drank after lunch,
the circle around today’s date on the calendar that tells me I haven’t yet paid
my bills. Yet in ten years, it will be
nothing but words to me, and less to my children, if children there are by that
time. How old will they be before they
begin to look at their parents, as I am beginning to now, with new eyes,
wondering who these people really are? Twenty? Thirty?
Or will they always look at me with that faint blindness, seeing only
the reflections of themselves?
I hope the latter isn’t true. I hope that I will be a wise mother, wise enough
to teach my children to see others clearly—even me.
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