As you get old, little is purely new. Experience flavors experiencing.
The brain will fill in the blanks with remembrances. Shortcuts.
Triggers.
My kid is home from his first year of college. My heart is full again (as I knew it would be). All is right in the world (as long as you don’t look at the actual world 😊 ).
It’s not like we talk a lot. Or at all.
The bulk of our interactions over the past few years has been some jovial insults passing in the hall.
Now just seeing him – no words spoken, no gesture given – launches my spirits.
Triggers. Instant full-bandwidth triggers.
Flashback to the little boy, laughing, full range of emotion, unfiltered. Thinking mom and dad are wielders of great power. Engaging with us, fascinated with us and the world. But still a little boy. Our little boy.
Seeing this full-grown, reserved, skeptical, cynical six-foot fully functional human who just navigated a year without us, unscathed, confident, eager for more. Oh, he’s BEAUTIFUL and GLORIOUS (like all twenty year olds). He is his own. And for us, a temporary beloved housemate.
The contrast between what we remember and what we see and all the all in between. The struggle, the striving, the joy, the friction, the risk, the growth, the growth, the growth!
All that years-sustained love compressed into a glance.
Should he deign to speak to us, we hear his message, but we also are simultaneously parsing his diction, his syntax, deconstructing what he is choosing to say (and what NOT to say) and the manner he chooses to say it. The new sophistication to how he now differentiates things he never seemed to notice a year ago. Flashbacks to when we thought our little boy was clever (“I’ll get it… I got it!” Wow!)
So much triggered by a glance and grunt.
An “Our baby is an adult!” wallop every single sighting.
I know the novelty of this will wear off. But NOT this summer.
These might be the most triumphant triggers I’ll ever experience. I don’t know. But I’m soaking these moments up. One thing I learned this year: shared moments are rare, they’re all precious. Embrace every one.