Taking a Child's-Eye View of Yourself

Ironically, one of the best ways to change your perception of yourself for the sake of your kids is to try to see yourself through their eyes. I'm not talking about simply modeling the behaviors we want our children to emulate; of course, that's critical at every stage of their development. But one of the pleasures of this stage of motherhood is that, even as their world expands to include other adult authority figures, six- and seven-year-olds tend toward mother worship. One of my favorite photos of Nick, age six, was taken with my mother, then eighty-five. They're in bathing suits, and Nick is on her lap, looking into her face as she tells him something. He's smiling, totally engrossed in the story or joke or song she's reciting, and as he locks eyes with her he rests his hand on her bony chest, just over her heart.

There's something about that touch -- gentle, absentminded, yet totally connected -- that draws me back to my kids' early school years, reading the compass to god-knows-where when one of them would say something that stopped me dead in my tracks. They were tuned in to a higher-level frequency, better able to grasp what was going on around them and to articulate their thoughts with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. On at least one occasion Nick's tendency to hold up a mirror to my life, to point out in his affectionate, slightly avuncular way that I was missing the point entirely, had a radical impact on how I saw myself.

It was toward the end of a day during which I had run frantically on a squeaky wheel to nowhere, feeling a little like the kids' gerbil, that Nick treated me to a critical It's a Wonderful Life moment. I was keeping him company as he took a bath, sitting with my back to the bathroom wall, rewriting one of several to-do lists I had read and refolded so many times it was falling apart.