About a year ago I got bifocal contacts. The concept seems impossible. One eye corrects for near vision and the other eye corrects for distance. Then it all gets straightened out in your brain somehow. I don’t understand it, but what happens for me is that I actually have to concentrate on what I want to see and let my brain know what to focus in on. It’s crazy but it does work. It’s just that things are not always in focus right away.
Maybe it doesn’t bother me that much because it is actually a lot like the way I see my kids growing up right before my eyes. No matter how closely you watch you can’t really get a good focus on how they’re changing every day. And then suddenly one day, you dial in a crisp clear picture and see these two young men sharing my world.
Sometimes I am shocked at how they’ve changed because of a growth spurt. But other times it’s a conversation or something they say that stops me and makes me marvel at the way their brains and bodies are maturing so invisibly and yet so drastically.
The other day it happened after a baseball game. Walking to the car I was chatting with John about his game. He had snagged a fly ball in left field running full speed and sliding as it dropped in his mitt. I told him I thought he’d done a good job catching that one. Then I said, “Out of curiosity, John, why did you slide when you caught that?”
After a brief pause he shrugged and said, “Oh, I don’t know, I think it was for dramatic effect.”
It worked.
I am determined that Jake is still little enough to be carried, but the last time I tried we both ended up bursting into laughter at the struggle to lug him through the house from the car. That’s when it happened. He’s counting the days until his 9th birthday but I really hadn’t seen that much change in him since his 8th milestone until now, laughing, I really saw him smiling back at me. That’s when I realized those dimpled cheeks are sitting atop a much longer neck than they used to. His amazing blue eyes smile out from a longer, maturing face that is suddenly much farther away from a toddler and much closer to a young man. And worst of all, the dimples that I love to stare at on his hands have actually given way to knuckles. When did that happen, I wonder.
Now, on the rare occasion when life does come into such sharp focus, I want to freeze time. Each one of them is so perfect just the way they are on this very day. At almost 9 and 11 I would just like to stop time and frame up this picture perfect scene…or to somehow figure out how to slow the speeding freight train from racing quite so fast downhill toward more birthdays, and school years and milestones. But, of course, the days will instead race by in a blur as I struggle to remind myself to enjoy every minute of the crazy ride whether it’s in full focus or not.
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