The Child Within

A few weeks ago as I tucked my nearly seven-year-old son into bed, I put a hand lightly on his cheek and said, “I really don’t think I can let you turn seven. I’ll miss you at six too much.”

“Don’t worry, Mommy,” he said. “I’ll always have six inside of me.” He laughed. “I hold all the ages I’ve been inside of me!”

I’ve thought about this conversation so many times since that night- because he was right, you know.

He was so very right.

 
My son did indeed turn seven without my consent and it seems like he grows an inch every day, but a look into his eyes is enough to reassure me that his six-year-old self is still there, right beneath the surface. I see six again when he valiantly struggles to hold back tears in front of his friends after falling and scraping his knee. I hear it when he calls out “I love you, Mommy!” at two in the morning from his bedroom across the hall and I groggily reassure him that I love him too.

Five is still there, too, peeking out from the endless comic book pictures he draws and the Lego creations he still leaves scattered around the house.
 

And when he snuggles up in his father’s lap on family movie nights, I see that same deeply satisfied smile he got on his face three years ago. Yep. There’s four.

 

I can even catch the remnants of my son’s baby years in the soft curls of his hair, his little boy belly, and his apple cheeks.

These fleeting glimpses of years gone by are even more poignant when I see them in my daughter.

 

She’ll be ten in a few weeks, and she’s on the cusp of major changes, both inside and out. She’s getting longer and leaner and she has become fiercely independent. I feel a deep ache sometimes for the little girl who for years was my shadow…

 

But in her long braids, I still see her four-year-old self.

 

When she takes horseback riding lessons, I see flashes of the five-year-old who was thrilled to be riding a pony for the first time.

 

When she’s lost in thought, I remember her pensive expressions at three, trying to figure out just how this world works.

 

And when I check on her at night, I see the same exact expression on her face that she had as a toddler, sleeping in her crib.

 These flashes of my children’s younger years pierce my heart with their suddenness, and yet they’re also strangely comforting. I suspect I’ll catch them even when my children are grown- in the mischievous glance of my son when he’s gotten away with a prank for example, or the habit my daughter has always had of absentmindedly taking a lock of hair and twisting it around her finger.

They remind me that we are indeed the sum of our experiences, and that there’s a child at every age within all of us, vulnerable and raw, carefully hidden beneath our adult facades.

More importantly, they give me hope that I’ll never really lose my children… even when it feels like they’ve left childhood– and me– far behind.