Vol. 88 - A Glimpse of the Future

On lazy Sundays

I caught a glimpse of it on Sunday. 

Emily took our daughter to the botanical gardens near our house, leaving me and our son at home. For a while, we played together. I was on the floor, playing cameraman with my phone and he was the director, setting up elaborate ramps for his Hot Wheels cars to tumble over. I filmed everything in slow motion and we had a blast watching the playbacks. 

After a few rounds of that, he asked if he could play his video game. We have a Playstation 4 that I fire up roughly once per quarter to play either Madden or FIFA. This has been my relationship to video games since the early 2000s. But, for Christmas, I bought him his own game; a Nickelodeon title with the cast from Rugrats and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles racing in small cars whose physics (and trappings) are eerily reminiscent of MarioKart. And so, for the next hour or so, he sat on our living room floor, his attention totally rapt by the video game.

As he played on, I laid horizontally on our couch behind him, reading Martin Short’s memoir that I’ve been into for the last week or so (highly recommend, BTW. LOL moments on nearly every other page). And for a moment I thought, "Is this what so many of those dads meant when they said things would get easier in a few years?"

Because in that moment, I caught a glimpse of what the not-too-distant-future might look like for me and Emily. That is, kids who can occupy themselves wholly independently of us (though, who still want and need us in close proximity).

Of course, we still have a long way to go before we can almost fully set our parent brains to neutral. After all, our daughter is only two. And I’m sure once we get to that point, we’ll yearn for the days when our babies were wholly dependent on us.

But that in that instant, in that glimpse, I saw the four of us, lazing around the house on a Sunday morning. Maybe Emily is up in the kitchen trying out a new recipe or right beside me on the couch, reading a book of her own. Maybe our son is playing a video game or quietly reading a book himself. Our daughter might be playing with her doll house or her own racecars somewhere in the house that isn’t directly under our watchful eyes.

Whatever it is, if it’s anything close to the picture that flashed before my eyes, it’s a place I can’t wait to be.