I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(25)

I don’t say that this is the thing I’d ask for if a genie offered me one wish.

Having kids made me think of my parents differently, too. If I’d been bumped out a notch on the timeline, so had they. Not too long ago, I was considering the “your memories from this day” pictures Facebook was showing me from five years earlier and doing that “just yesterday!” thing in my head. Then I thought: In four sets of five years, I’ll be in my sixties. My children will be in their thirties. (How the HELL can that be true?) My parents might be gone. Like a runaway car with no brakes or emergency lever, time was accelerating beyond control. I felt a surge of soul-panic as I held my phone in my hand and looked at that picture: Please slowdownslowdownslowdown.

I see my friends caring for their elderly parents, and the role reversal takes my breath away. Moms and dads have turned into old people who have seemingly turned back into toddlers. These once competent adults don’t understand how to work things; they refuse to take their medicine; they need help.

It makes me want to hop in the machine and revisit my younger parents. I want to go back to when I was sixteen years old, so I can tell them that although they would not let me stay out past eleven o’clock and I said at the time that they were just mean and didn’t want anyone to have fun, I get it now and I’m sorry and they were right. I was never up to any good past that hour, and I should damn well have come home.

I want to go back to even before I was born, to see my mother when she was in college and nicknamed “Wild Mary.” Growing up, I found that moniker to be incongruous with the taskmaster who made me take piano lessons on Friday afternoons, although once I graduated from college and got out into the world, she softened considerably. She knitted little round, fuzzy hats for each of my babies, so their little round, fuzzy heads wouldn’t get cold. She is still the first person I call when I don’t know whether it would be tacky to buy a Christmas wreath made of fake holly or if it’s okay to wear a suede jacket in April. I want to go back and tell her then that she will be all of this now.

I want to go back and spend more time with my dad—I haven’t called him Daddy in decades, although he still calls me Mary LaLa. I want to listen when he turns up Little Richard songs on the radio to get my mom to dance. I want to make tiny acorn and mushroom cabins again in the greenhouse behind our home in Memphis, where I’d find the butts of his sneaked cigarettes and bury them in the dirt with my tiny garden spade so he wouldn’t get caught. I want to be in the kitchen that Thanksgiving in Augusta when he tried to be helpful and wash a pan full of turkey drippings that had been left on the counter, and when my mom saw him squirting Joy dishwashing liquid all over the greasy brown bits, she screamed, “YOU’RE KILLING THE GRAVY WITH JOY,” and my brother and I laughed until we couldn’t breathe.

I know that one day, I will look to my son—who was my baby five minutes ago, yes, he was—to carry me up the stairs, to drive me to doctor’s appointments, to help me when I spill something or can’t operate the sleeves of a sweater. He is already taller than me. He will be a man before I can blink. I feel this ahead of me on the timeline and I need to get in the time machine and go back. Please, I say to the universe. I can accept all this if you just let me go back sometimes. Let me nudge the edge of a sippy cup between his lips. Let me comb his matted little fluff of hair. Let me hold his wriggling torso between my knees and button his overalls at his shoulder before he bolts away. If I could just go back and forth. If it weren’t all or nothing.



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I used to want a fancy camera, one with a big, powerful zoom lens. I’d go to the kids’ school holiday concerts and try to capture decent shots from the bleachers with my phone, only to wind up with grainy shadowscapes populated with indecipherable little figures. Luckily there was always at least one parent in every class who had a real camera and took perfectly crisp, magazine-worthy photos featuring the unpixelated nostrils and eyelashes of even the back-row xylophone players. Whenever the fancy-camera parents would email everyone else the pictures they took, I’d pull them up on my computer and find myself unable to look away. At first I’d think, yes, I want pictures like this of every moment of childhood. But the more I looked at these exquisite photographs, the more desperate I felt. Such precise visual reminders of exactly what my children looked like in a moment that was irretrievably past thrilled my heart and then broke it. The photo was proof that the split second was over. As sharp as that focus was on their hair, light glimmering on individual strands, that’s how sharp the pain was at not being able to reach out my hand and feel its silkiness on my fingers.

It would be better not to be reminded so much—or to be reminded in slightly blurrier terms. I never bought the fancy camera.



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In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote that “when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” Every despair in the world comes down to this, she believes. Every joy, too, I say. Because every joy will run out. And so will every life. And maybe that’s what I mourn as my children grow: the fact that they and I and we will one day not be here at all. No one’s getting out of here alive.



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If the person I was speaking to is still with me and is looking at me like I’m the voice of doom, I say: Yikes. That got dark fast. Sorry.