On parenting, imagination, and memory

[mamajoan]

Back in 2004 when the Red Sox won the World Series (angelic choir noise, jazz hands), mom and I and metafrantic took Isaac to the victory parade. He was not even one-and-a-half yet, so he didn't get it, but hey, you know, parade! ;) There were vendors selling t-shirts everywhere, and I wanted to get him one, but the smallest size they had was a "child small" which is sized for a kid around 5-6 years old. At the time, I looked at it and went, "please, this will never fit him!" LOL -- needless to say, now it fits him perfectly and he wears it a lot.

Sometimes I see a pregnant woman walking down the street, her with her big belly and me with my two rambunctious monkeys, and I'm giving her a "I remember when that was me" type of look, and she's giving me a bland "your life has no relation to mine whatsoever, you mean nothing to me" type of look. And I think back to when I was pregnant. I too would have looked right through a woman with a 3- and/or 6-year-old. In no way would I have been thinking "That'll be me not long from now!" If I ever thought that, it was only when I saw women with little babies.

What do the two anecdotes above have in common? ...a weird kind of wilfully-illogical thinking that's particular to parenting. Obviously when I bought the t-shirt, I knew logically that some day my child would grow big enough to fit into it. And obviously when the pregnant woman looks at the 6-year-old, she knows logically that some day she'll have herself one of those. But it's just SO hard to imagine that we don't even try. We just sort of go, "nah, never!" and dismiss it from consideration. Rationally we know that's crazy and makes no sense, heh, but we do it anyway. It's a weirdness of parenting.

Sometimes I try to envision what Isaac will look like or act like at twenty, or sixteen, or ten, or even just eight. It's impossible. I simply can't. I can barely even imagine Ruthie at six, even though I have a handy six-year-old for reference! But sometimes I see a mom with two kids, let's say a boy of 12 and a girl of 9-10, and I can convince myself to look at her and go "that's me in a few years!" But it's still so abstract. A nine-year-old must be someone else's kid, not mine!

It's funny, because in general I think I have a pretty darn good imagination. But when it comes to the kids, it's like a blind spot. Sort of the flip side of the "momnesia" coin. I guess it's our way of being firmly grounded in the now. We can barely remember what our kids were like as babies, and we can barely imagine what they'll be like as older kids. All we have is what they are now.

Comments

[mofic.livejournal.com]

When Doran was a baby, Stacy and I talked a lot about having a second, and how things would change for us as a family if we did. And we talked about different times to do it and what a good age spread would be. And when we'd talk about that, we'd refer to "the baby" and "the older child."

One day it hit me and I said, in shock, "Stacy! When we have a second baby, Doran will be 'the older child.' He won't be the baby!" He was just so quintessentially baby to me that in my mind's eye there was this amorphous Older Child we would somehow acquire but the baby would always be Doran.

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

Somehow I can't help thinking it's all tied in with the thing where I couldn't call Ruthie anything but "Baby" until she was almost a year old. Then at some point I got worried that she would come to think her name was Baby (cf "Dirty Dancing") so I told Isaac that we needed to start practicing calling her Ruthie.

[tiggrrl.livejournal.com]

It's weird, but whenever I see older girls with red hair, I immediately look at them to figure out what Emi will be like in a few years. Only the redheads though. I think I use other people's kids deliberately to figure out what my life will be like in the future, maybe because I can't imagine it with my own kid.

[evil-macaroni.livejournal.com]

I was just like that woman, only I continued reacting like that even when I had a newborn. It was like the mothers of newborns and I were all in this club together and everyone else didn't belong. I already see it when I run into people with tiny babies. EM Jr does not compute for them. We are Not The Same.