Double Vision

One of the strangest things about life is that so often what should feel strange instead feels utterly natural, inevitable, even, oftentimes as the realization that it should feel strange is occurring. Wow. That's quite a jungle tour of a sentence. You'd almost think my day had started at 6 with bananas being smashed into my hair and that I had traveled to Chinatown by subway with three other adults and three children under 4 and a stroller to eat crab and pork soup dumplings and that in between so many other things happened that I would use up my whole seven hundred and fifty words just to begin to describe them.

In other words, I had a jam-packed day, which I like, most of the time, but there were very few quiet and reflective moments in it, which I think I need more of. One such moment came during what I will call the third chunk of the day, around lunchtime, after I'd left Nicole with Lily and Eva at a restaurant to go and pick up Annika, who had just woken up from her nap. As I pushed the stroller toward the restaurant on my way back to where they were already eating, I could see them from a block away or more, as they were eating outside. And I thought to myself: There is Nicole, sitting at a sidewalk cafe eating lunch with our TWO CHILDREN, who look quite a bit like miniature versions of us, and act quite a bit like junior versions of us, enough so that it seemed to me, in this moment--once I squinted Nicole out of the picture--that I was watching us sitting and eating lunch in New York, which of course doesn't make sense because we didn't know each other as children, and when we used to come to New York in college, to go to a museum and Canal Jeans and maybe Bloomingdales and a Chinese restaurant where a glass of wine was free, we never ate at a sidewalk cafe, at least not that I can remember.

But actually it seemed more like they were distinct from us (which of course they are, although it doesn't usually feel that way yet) and entirely feasible that at some point thirty odd years down the road they could very well be seated at a sidewalk cafe eating lunch together with children of their own, talking about how much more relaxing it is to have lunch without one's children, or even (more likely) about us, and how we used to take them out together in New York when they were little and how one day a woman behind us in line at a store looked at them and said, "Best friends?" and we sort of smiled at her--she was an odd seeming woman--and I thought to myself, well, we'll see.

But the really strange part of what I was seeing as I looked at them, the part that didn't feel strange although I thought that it should, was that we had these children at all, after all the years we had of making cookie dough just to eat the batter, lying on our backs on the floor listening to music, walking on fences, singing in harmony--of being the children, or rather the young adults, and then the not so young adults, without them, and how it was--as goes the cliche--almost impossible to imagine not having them, and just as impossible to imagine that they would not be sitting together at a table on the sidewalk sharing a cup with a straw and pizza with basil leaves on it and that Nicole would be sitting watching them, or rather looking out at something on 14th Street as they leaned into each other, hysterically laughing, and that I would be walking toward them, smiling, pushing this other one in a stroller.