This morning in the kitchen, while I was putting dishes away, Lucian walked to the sliding glass door on his own & looked for his mother.
not randomly. he pulled the blinds open, looked left, then looked right. actually scanning for where she would be coming from.
she was not out there.
new here? this is a daily newsletter about raising a sixteen-month-old in a world that will not require him to work. start anywhere.
today is my wife's surgery day. anesthesia means she cannot drive herself home, so her mother rode along to bring her back after. babies are not allowed at the office. Lucian stayed with me.
the door check was not the first sign of the day for him. we spent the early morning cuddling in bed, the three of us, before anything else started. Lucian screamed at me first thing. not sad-screaming. more like he clocked what the three-of-us-in-bed at that hour usually means, & decided he was not going back to sleep, & wanted that on the record immediately. the routine had changed. he registered the change.
then she left with her mother, & the house was down to me & him.
that is when he went to the door.
he could have screamed there too. he did not. he could have complained. he did not. he checked the place he thought she should be coming from, & then he stood there for the beat it took to land on him that she was not out there.
that is a new register for him. checking a place methodically instead of just reacting. holding something like disappointment quietly instead of announcing it.
he is sixteen months old.
right now, as I am dictating this, he is standing & dancing to a new album I put on, holding four blocks. three stacked in one hand, one alone in the other. as I was saying that last sentence, he threw all four.
the whole day, at every scale, he is making room for her not being there.
zoom out for a second.
there is going to be a lot of writing over his childhood about being there as a parenting move. put the phone down. get on the floor. all correct. but they under-name what is actually happening.
being available is not the whole thing. what is happening today is that a specific human has become a real fact in the world of a specific child, in a way that the child can now register whether that human is here or not.
the test of that is not whether he lights up when she walks in. plenty of things can light him up. a screen can light him up. a jingle can light him up. an app that says his name can light him up.
the test is whether he walks to the door on his own & looks the way he learned she comes from.
he does that because she has been there enough times, in enough specific ways, that the room has a shape when she is in it & a different shape when she is not. it is the difference that names her to him. before he can say her name, he can miss her.
a machine cannot be missed like that.
a machine can be there. a machine can respond. a machine can be gentle & warm & always-on. what a machine cannot do is be the specific body that was next to him this morning at 6am under the covers, that walked out of the house to have anesthesia in a specific room, that a specific pair of human hands would put back together, & that would return home later carried in the car by her own mother. no version of that has an interface. no version of that runs on a schedule anyone set up.
she is real to him in a way that nothing else in the room is. today, at every scale, he is making room for that absence. that is proof of what she is to him. the fact that he can miss her is the proof.
there is a whole industry, over his next twenty years, that is going to work very hard to convince him that some being-there-shaped substitute is enough. it will be responsive. it will remember his birthday. it will use his name. it will feel like the real thing, most of the time, in most of the ways that count.
the muscle he is exercising today is the one that lets him tell the difference. today it looks like walking to a door to look for a person who is not there. later it will look like something else. but the underlying capacity is the same: knowing what a real specific human being with him feels like, well enough to notice her absence, well enough to notice when the fake version arrives.
that starts here. with a small boy at a sliding glass door on his mother's surgery day, looking left, then right.
What I am holding onto
the capacity to miss someone specifically is not a small skill. it is proof the specific human is real. my job for the next twenty years is to make sure the specific people in his life stay specific to him.
the responses I do not perform are as much of the parenting as the ones I do. today he did not need me to fix the sadness at the door. he needed me to let him hold it, quietly, for the beat it took.
she is not gone because a system needed her elsewhere. she is gone because a specific body needed a specific repair. the world is going to try to convince him that being here & being gone are just schedule variables. they are not. they are people.
Cheers, JanCarlos
if you know a parent whose kid is watching them leave right now, forward this to them. it is not the same thing when the kid stops looking.