An Urge To Freeze Time
(Note: I wrote this in 2008. The kids are now practically 19, and 16 1/2. I love them with all my heart as they are right now, but oh my goodness, I miss when they were little. For a whole bunch of reasons.)
They do these things.
At night, after supper, we walk the dog up the street so she can take care of business. We go past the Como tennis courts, in front of which are some big boulders. Every single night, they say, “Mom, can we jump off?” And every night I say yes, and then pause to watch as they climb on top of the biggest one and leap off, landing in a tuck and rolling on the grass. They laugh. The boy, who is 7, inevitably announces, “That was awesome.”
After that they race as fast as their legs will carry them up some steps and past the courts, flying to the little piece of pavement that dips down to meet the road. They want to see if they can beat me. They always do. They exult in their victory.
After the hound makes her pile, and I scoop it up into the plastic grocery bag and tie it tightly, the 10-year-old girl takes the bag between two pinched fingers and the two of them race off again, this time back down the little hill, to the municipal trash can that is bolted to a pole.
She tosses it in, and then the pair of them tear away, as if from a burning building, screeching “It’s gonna blow! It’s gonna blow!” at the tops of their lungs. The dog races after them, pulling me along. They stop a half block away, breathless with the running, the screaming, the laughing.
They love this. They love this set of ridiculous and pointless little activities that make up the post-supper poop walk. As the 7-year-old says, shaking his head like the wise sage that he has become, “It never gets old.”
But they do. They get older and older, and as they do, these things fall away. I find myself staring at them, trying to memorize their faces, their inflections, their phrasing. I wish I had done that all along, as they morphed from infants to toddlers to little kids to big kids, but I fear that I did not. You are so tired then, and so busy and so caught up in the moment that you fail to realize that each of those moments, in its own way, is the last one of its kind.
My girl used to do this thing, when I would read to her at bedtime, she would hold my thumb as I held the page. It kind of drove me crazy. Then one day I realized she didn’t do it anymore and then I missed it like crazy.
My son likes to twirl my hair. This drives me berserk, as I often end up with a dreadlock on top of my head. But I try to temper my temper, because I have come to realize that all too soon, he won’t want to do it anymore.
One day last summer, we were on the Cape and it was a foggy, socked-in day so we piled in the car and drove up to Wellfleet to have lunch at this restaurant on the cliffs. After we ate we clambered down to the beach, where the overnight tide had created a smaller cliff in the sand. “Can we jump?” they asked. “Of course,” we said.
An hour later, they were still leaping off the edge, onto the sand below, laughing hysterically, trying to out-freestyle each other and impress us. I took a picture with my cell phone, and then I started to cry a little.
“What’s the matter?” my husband asked. “Pretty soon they won’t want to do this anymore,” I said, “and that makes me sad.”
Intellectually, I understand that they can’t stay this way forever. That’s not the way it works; it’s not the deal you make when you have kids. The point is to arm them with the tools they need to grow away from you, to go away from you, to be successful on their own.
I have that picture on my cell phone, that moment of absolute freedom and joy and childhood, freeze-framed forever. It’s the best I can do.
