Mother, child bonded by reflection of love

The thing about your children is that for a while, in the beginning, they are all you can see. You watch them sleep, lock glances as they feed and study their every move. Your eyes follow them as they learn to walk and run and grow.

When they’re happy they run to you. When they’re mad they stand in front of you and wail. You can see exactly what they’re thinking and feeling.

Then, almost overnight it seems, you can’t. They learn to mask emotion and hide what’s inside. You can look right at them and miss what you want to see the most.

One day, when my first child was just a toddler and I was holding her close, she stopped talking suddenly and leaned quite close to me. Capturing my face in her hands she peered at me and said, “Hey! You got a baby in your eyes.”

She’d seen her own reflection.

I laughed and told her it was true. I did have a baby in my eyes. Then I teased her and said I kept a baby in my heart, too. When I asked her if she wanted to hear the baby dance she pressed her ear to my chest and listened to my heartbeat. Her eyes, as dark as my own, widened.

It wasn’t long before she figured it all out, of course, before she learned that she was seeing herself in my eyes and the only sound in my chest was the beating of my own heart.

As she grew, we would play the game occasionally and she would touch her nose to mine, eyelash to eyelash, or lay with her head against me. But, eventually, she got too big to hold.

Then, in the blink of an eye, she was a teenager who kept her thoughts to herself and grew distant and cool toward me. Looking at me seemed to embarrass her.

I watched and watched for some sign, some clue that she was still mine; that she was still the little girl who had found herself in me.

I watched so hard I almost missed it.

One day, when she was so angry with me she simmered and boiled like a pot on the stove, I turned away from her to look out the window.

Standing to the side, slightly behind me, just at the corner of my eye, she fired off the last word and turned to storm out of the room. But then she paused.

In a movement so small and slight it would have escaped me if I had been looking directly at her, she swayed slightly in my direction.

It wasn’t a voluntary action. She had let her defenses down and for a microsecond the invisible filament that bound us had pulled her toward me. She wanted her mother.

Then she recovered, wheeled, and left the room.

For a long moment I didn’t move. I was afraid to.

It took a while, but the distance between us closed. She came back to me, back to cuddling on the sofa or snuggling on my bed. She came back to laughing at my jokes and telling me what she was feeling.

Now, she’s an adult. She’ll be 21 in just a few days.

For the most part, we get along well. Oh, we still have our days. We get angry and we argue. But we get along.

I can’t say with any certainty that we won’t ever be estranged again. But the important thing is I’ve learned to trust what I can’t always see.

I’ll always be the mother in my little girl’s eyes.