Reflections, Reflections

It's funny how life as a parent mutates over time. It goes from your children being totally dependent on you, the parent, to their growing apart and away, carving out their own space and way of being in the world. It's a process that can feel bittersweet. But it can also hold up to you a magic mirror, one in which you see the person you gave birth to reflected back at you as a unique human being but one who, for better or worse, embodies much of what you transmitted to him via DNA and life example. You hope--and maybe pray??--that the child you raise becomes someone you not only love, but someone you actually like, someone you would want to claim as your own if he weren't yours. It is a joy beyond words to really, really like your child, and to discover that not only through physical connection--seeing and spending time with him--but through finding out how he thinks, and what he thinks about. This link contains the latest magical discovery I have made. Http://www.tuftsdaily.com/sports/sam-gold-the-ot-1.2731467#.T5P_rQJWEcE.mailto If there is any sadness here, it only comes from thinking about the fact that Sam is so much the embodiment of my father, who lived a life of quiet, exceptional decency, yet did not live to see Sam embrace his own deep decency and thoughtfulness so wholeheartedly. Life is funny and heartbreaking that way: it can give you gifts of inheritance and gratitude, but steal some of those gifts right out from under you, so you are left with wistfulness where full-throated joy should be. Nevertheless, I have to believe that the person who is physically missing in my life--my father--is given back to me through my son, and through his own reflections and commentary on the world in which he lives. This, after all, is what real inheritance is, or ought to, be.