Anticipation

It recently occurred to me while surveying yet another park with the usual collection of rusted swings, slides with jagged edges, and the ubiquitous broken glass, that watching a toddler is much like I would expect the work of a Secret Service agent to be. In the same way that these folks are constantly anticipating what dangers might lie ahead for the people that they are protecting, life with Kaia is always looking and thinking what is in his path. In fact, it is this never-ending attention to the present and future that makes me the most exhausted.

There is a scene in the movie, In the Line of Fire, where an older Secret Service agent named Frank Horrigan (played by Clint Eastwood) is struggling to keep up with the president’s motorcade as he runs alongside. He has pushed and pushed to be placed in this post, but as the younger agents do their job with the physical ease that comes with youth, it is clear that the better days have passed him by. Sometimes I feel like this. Especially when I am carrying a 20 pound backpack filled with water, toys, food, tubes of stuff, etc. and chasing after this rambunctious little critter who wants to climb an 8 foot ladder to go down a tubular slide that has a gaping hole in it mid-way down. I wonder what it must be like for parents who are 10 years younger and who don’t have chronic injuries from the glory days of high school athletics…

But what Horrigan lacks in stamina, he makes up for with the experience to see and anticipate things that younger agents overlook. I don’t know that I have developed any more of a spidey sense that the next parent, but yesterday, when we turned the corner of a staircase at a monument in Delhi (I guess I may need to re-title the subheading of this blog) and a rusted nail was sticking out a few inches, right at Kaia’s shoulder level, the effort to whisk him away from the path of danger was as smooth as could be. The Baby Secret Service would have been proud.

But more than any kind of life experience that you bring to parenting, I think it is the time that you spend with your children and developing a deeper connection that somehow allows you to sense danger. It is really wild. Sometimes I can have my back turned to him and I just know that he’s into something that he shouldn’t be…like picking up food wrappers off of the ground or putting things in his mouth.

Why I Love this Time: How with each day he says one or two new words. Yesterday it was “book” and today it was “ouch”.