Ears

The thing about revisiting your childhood is that you might actually find it.  In fact, what I found out is that it is still there, just as I left it.  Only it’s different.  It’s different in a cozy and not-so-cozy way.  The most startling yet soothing realization is that it’s all good, all as it should be.

Something I also discovered along the way is that immersing myself in my childhood deepened my connection to my parents, mainly my father.  That said, I could see my mother in my wife’s tears, and I wondered what it was like for them when they had young children as I do.  More than once, I felt my wife and I standing in the ghost-like shoes of my parents.  

And, above all, I saw myself in my boys.  Plural.  That surprised me.  I expected to see my reflection in my oldest, but finding a point of light in the eyes of my youngest that mirrored mine was unexpected.  I can’t say why.  It just was.  He still tests my patience more than anyone else on the globe, but I think I understand that a little better.  

It is amazing to me that I can feel as whole as I do yet exist simultaneously in both of my boys, in my adult mind and body, and in a shadowy remnant of myself that awakens each day and gleefully wanders the paths and corridors of this place I first visited when I was just a little boy.  I exist in all these forms, yet I can feel my connection to all of them.  They are extensions of me.  I just have to take the time to feel their existence.

In going back to I place I visited many times as a child, I felt peace as the man I am…husband, father, son, brother, grandson, friend.  And I understood my place in the continuum of life a little better.

The mouse ears never really come off, I guess.