Look, mom! Look at me!

Becoming a parent grants access to a most peculiar event, an event that is laborious in the making and stretches indefinitely in it's plot.  You become an audience to the stage show of a human life.  A life made and observed, at times like an out-of-body experience, as something of yourself is unfolding and revealing  secrets of unimagined possibilities.  We observe  a "mini-me" making strides with an untold destination we wait to behold.  Yet, no matter how much a child is identical to our makeup, there is also the most intriguing percentage, that is not father, nor mother.  Individuality demands a witness.  Therefore, you take a seat, and with rapt attention, take in the life of a child, one act at a time.

Human development in one short year is nothing short of miraculous.  From a watery cocoon, they cry from lungs burning with their first breath, and take suck to a nectar of life.  This infant lies helpless and unable, but not ill-equipped, and so it begins.... A journey of milestones to which this infant gains mobility and control and stands erect and takes a seat to dine with us, chewing a morsel of food that could have brought death just a few short months before, and with a mother tongue will ask for more.

As that first year winds to a close, the milestones are not in such rapid succession, and with minds so attuned to our child attaining mobility and speech, we might start to take for granted the many hurdles they continue to leap everyday.  A baby doesn't ask for our attention, but they have the means to command it, and with those very same lungs our toddlers, children and adolescents beckon our gaze.

As we bump along on this planet, one thing is certain: there are a great many people living side-by-side with us.  Many, perhaps most, may possess much higher levels of achievement, natural talent, intelligence, symmetry.... and the list goes on, leaving us to feel quite common and average in relation to one another.  We plod a course very well traveled, trampled by the human experience, and, yet, we still seek validation for taking these steps of commonality.  If we are all, basically, the same and share similar levels of accomplishment, and we are equipped with equivalent bodies and brains, why do we strive for significance?  I dare say, what makes us so similar also makes us restless and becomes the very driving force to which we seek some level of recognition.

One thing to love about a child is that they have no idea that what they are achieving is so average.  They are thrilled with every single autonomous step.  More than any adult, they seem to best sense the glory of an individual attempt and succeeding at it.  I love that in any moment of learning, they burst with pride and glow in it.  They understand, more than our tired, uninspired brains that have long taken ourselves for granted, the brilliance in anything learned and retained and applied.  What better gift could we give than to lock eyes with them in that moment and witness their greatness?  A child will rarely, if ever, find satisfaction in lonely accomplishment.  So we join them and, thereby, exponentially increase the magnitude of their momentary importance, above anyone else, be it ever so fleeting.


They call out to us.... "Mom, look!"  "Dad, watch this!"  "Look at me, guys!"  "Watch me!"



It seems so demanding when taken out of context.  It sounds self-indulgent.  It's anything but.  It's the very thing that makes the human experience great.  It's the fresh air in a dull day.  It's a wave rippling through the doldrums.  It is an individual finding a place.  It is life living.

Like a tree that falls in the forest, do our kids really exist if we don't take the time to truly see them?  They  exist in an ever-changing form that is never to be repeated as the days go by.  Sometimes, we see more than they will ever know, and we witness their frustration and pain and victories quietly in the shadows, hoping and rejoicing until we bring it to light and bask together with them in understanding, knowing all too well the triumph and tragedy of the existence we share.

They require, no....need, our attention, attention that may not always be convenient, but will always be a testimony to the wonders of humanity in a single, magnificent person.