Double Take

Last night I helped Archer with his first ever Homework assignment. It was one of those All About Me posters that brought me back to my own childhood. Where for the first time, a child is to write about her dreams, his wishes, their favorite colors…

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A doctor.”

So I cut out a photograph of a doctor.

“Where is your favorite place to go?”

“Gooey and Papa's house.”

So I cut out a picture of Archer in my parents' vegetable garden.

“What is your favorite thing to do?”

“Eat ice cream.”

So I pulled a picture of Archer clutching a paper bowl of Pinkberry. And he drew pictures in the squares where I couldn’t provide a photograph – his imagination colliding with our memories.

He wrote his name across the top of the poster and I wrote the rest. And then I rolled the giant poster, rubber-banded it and left it by the door, beside Archer’s field trip permission slip and his order-form for school pictures.

***

Last night Hal turned Fable’s car seat around because it was time. Because Fable turned one year old and weighs more than twenty-five pounds and she was becoming increasingly frustrated having to cross her legs against the back of the seat.

“All done,” he said.

“Thank you.”

I thought nothing of it buckling the children into their car seats this morning. It wasn’t until we pulled away from the curb and I checked my rear-view mirror that I did a double take.


Fable babbled, her legs free and kicking as Archer clutched his All About Me poster to his chest.

And suddenly: there they were: Older.


I reached my hand back and Fable took it, her grey eyes focused out the window, the world from a new angle, no longer backwards.

“Fable?”

…And then she turned toward me. With eyes that appeared at once different. A shade darker. A degree rounder. A millimeter bigger than they did just moments before.

Changed.

A new view can do that I suppose.


“Archer?”

“What?”

“Did you notice Fable’s seat? It looks like yours now.”

But Archer’s attention was elsewhere. He looked away.


We drove to school in silence. Too busy studying homework and windows and the changes that occur in children that used to be babies with rear-facing car seats.

When we got to school, Archer handed in his first ever homework assignment and Fable waved to her brother, goodbye. And it was just like any other day except it felt so completely different: Watching Archer run to his friends without looking back. Buckling Fable into her car seat forward facing.

“They’re getting so big,” people sometimes say.

But change is slow for something that feels so fast.

A watched pot never boils and a watched child never grows until one day he comes home from school with his first homework. Until one night her father turns her car seat around. And before you know it the pot is empty - its water evaporated. Gone.

GGC