Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Beautiful Boy

There are times when the sheer beauty of my children shakes me. Sometimes it is in the way they move around the room, or in the curve of a tiny hip as one lays sleeping. Other times it's watching them race wildly around the park, their strong, young legs propelling their smooth, brown bodies through the woods or across a field. And then sometimes there is no reason, they just turn and I gasp, impacted with their beauty.

I suppose, this seems common place. Most parents think their children are beautiful. I just never expected to feel this so intensely. At times, it as if I am lifted out of myself and looking afar at these creatures. At these moments, I realize they are not mine. I don't own them, can't own, don't want to own them. These are the glimpses of their absolute alieness from me. And yet due to the paradoxical nature of life, they are mine. I may not own them but I have a sacred responsibility to them. It still leaves me stunned that I somehow produced these creatures....that from me came such beauty.

This all comes about from watching Umberto play the other day. He was running away from me, and I called to him to tell him we had to leave soon. He stopped running, his body still vibrating with movement, half turned toward me, sulky and defiant. I was silent for a moment lost in the sheer gorgeousness of my own child. I smiled, and his sulky pout broke into a smile that left me a bit wounded.

5 comments:

John B-R said...

What a great description of love. As a parent myself I know what you mean about "every parent ..." etc but - you DO have particularly striking children. (Shd give you pause next time you think of yrself as ugly ... only half their genes crom from papa)

Lolabola* said...

it's true, they are very lovely kids

Horacio said...

umberto's lovely & handsome but hiding behind the boy eating the ice-cream there is a badass jedi!

Ros said...

I know exactly what you mean. And now that I'm a parent, I understand why my dad would look up at me & my bro at the dinner table, and say to my mom, "How did we get such beautiful children?"

Julie said...

I understand what you are saying - but I wish that you didn't see your children's beauty as separate and apart from you. I see you all over their beautiful faces.

I think that's the thing that tends to amaze me with my own children. Most often I see them as their own separate beings - but every now and then one of them makes a face, or looks up at me just so, and I see myself peeking up at me. It's in those brief and fleeting moments that I am ripped away from my own insecurities enough to see my own beauty.

And then there are times when, I see their beauty as an amazing combination of that which is like me and that which is everything I'm not - and I cherish that too - because in it lies all my hopes for them to realize themselves in ways I've never learned to.

All that's a long, long, long way of saying that your kids are so amazingly gorgeous because they have a beautiful mother.