A wonderful moment came in the midst of a uselessly harried day.
We have a yearly “Bring Your Child to Work” day which has been dubbed unofficially “Rugrat Day”, since it seemed at one time, all the progeny from our floormates used to be 9-month blobs. This made the day more of a presentation ooh-and-awww day rather than anything beneficial for the children. They were all roaming on a blanket in the library one year, and the next, the older kids either stood behind their mothers’ skirts or took over the candybowls on the sly. It’s been a loose-cannonball kind of day, traditionally.
I was gearing up for a mad day just concerning my own work early this morning, too bothered and worried and hurried to even dress well today (unwashed restyled hair, no earrings, all black, lucky that I threw on a necklace). In among the stressed out crisis phone call conversations of my two bosses, people talking amongst themselves going up and down the aisle discussing deals and financials, and intermittant airplane-simulator white noise from our printer, I noticed Attorney E’s daughter was emerging from her cocoon of unaware kid mania into real childhood. Standing like a new little person.
There she was, the little nymphet in place of what used to be a rampant smudgy four year old. I was shocked to see how her height even at not-quite-6 is now towering over other children (her dad and mom are both over 6 feet). Her hair had grown princess-long, and her attitude was now shy and eye-wide under her sandy bangs.
I watched as Mom and Dad packed her into a jeans jacket to take her outside to be with the other kids of that age for a courtyard lunch, and everything fell away beside them. It became a silent, perfect place, unnoticed by the flotsam and storm of business activity. The three hardly spoke, having already talked over Dad’s shoulder while watching him working in his office. Mom was quietly smiling, buttoning her up, Dad in back of her was lifting and smoothing out her hair, just tenderly… they moved together in familiar rhythm, in such a small circle of repeated everyday assurance that harmony and warmth just seemed to pulse off the three of them in waves. It was a pausing, taking time to perfectly love, a pearl moment.
Dad in his blue shirt, one in a sea of blue shirts here, so standard, snappy, efficient, seemed softened in an instant; daughter and Mom were dressed in warm and patterned reds, pinks, blues; a colliding carnival of color against the beige box of our daily containment. They were rosy cheer personified.
How I envied them that moment. This is a little family who knows how to grab happiness, even if it’s in snippets. They do it amid two dogs and a number of other exuberant chaotic factors at home like a side-business for Mom, nieghbors, mothers-in-law, serendipity barely clinging to sanity. But they still make time for their daughter to have a kiss from her daddy after school, a kiss which they do by “drive-by.” The drill is: Mom calls from her cell in the car while driving daughter home in the afternoon; finds out if Dad’s available, and if so, stops by in the parking lot to have him come down from his tower of steel and glass just to have a few minutes of What Did You Do Today? and a hug. This is a very valuable thing, since Dad travels more than anyone in our department.
And of course I know that this kind of moment doesn’t last, that it bursts into tears later over something stupid like a toy or candy or a skinned knee, or icky food, or a mean playmate, or a brother, and I know that those clothes don’t come cheap and Mom woke up early and Dad doesn’t get enough time with them in order to keep them in their nice house, but they HAVE these moments. They’re there.
Here before me I see that those two parents know that. They absolutely know. They grab this little moment and it glows in their hands like a firefly.
I want mine too.
How on earth do I get it from where I am, I don’t know.
I had always expected to be a mother, a grandmother, something.
Though I don’t have it; I am almost sure I deserve it. Somehow. In some miniature, bright way.
I’ll just keep looking for it, walking around and around through all these rooms of existence, back to the center.
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