Standing on the Corner in Winslow, Arizona

One of the most unexpected things that has happened to me since becoming a parent is the constant reassessment of my own parents' lives. Although I have been an adult for a long time now, I am realizing more and more how much I always saw them as existing in my own solar system. At times, oftentimes, they were each or both the sun, but the sun of my solar system: the givers of heat and light and life to me.

Do I exist this way for Lily? Will I for Annika? I'm not sure. Sometimes I see Lily watching me, head cocked slightly, observing me do something with a slightly worried expression in her eyes. This weekend I was listening to the radio and started singing along, enthusiastically, to an Eagles song I hadn't heard in a while, and I saw that look in her eyes as she assessed the situation. "I didn't know you knew this song," she said, a bit accusingly, or rather hurt, as though I'd been keeping something essential from her.

"Do you know this song?" I asked, surprised.

"No," she said. "I've never heard it before. But I didn't know you knew it." Oh, Lily.

I get this, now that I think about it. And much of the time, it feels good to be the sun. Important. It is scary as a small child and sometimes even as a grown-up, to imagine the people who anchor your world out there strolling around in someone else's solar system, doing things you don't know about, singing songs with unfamiliar lyrics. It can come as a shock to see someone you love make manifest an aspect, an angle, that reveals vast or even minuscule unknowns. I can remember moments like this from my own childhood: My father, murmuring a prayer in Hebrew at a second cousin's bar mitzvah, my mother, laughing with a friend on the patio, a different laugh than the laugh she laughed with us.

A glimpse, then, of these other selves. They are people. They exist when I am not around. They may exist differently when I am not around. And then, forgotten. On purpose and involuntarily both. Do we need to see the people we love the way we want to see them? Is it necessary for them to break out on occasion, chip away at this limiting shell, in order for us to see them at all?

It is true, on some level, that I am so connected now to these two girls that no matter where I am or who I'm with or what I'm doing they are there, too, at the outer edges of the solar system or right there too close to the sun. Look away; you can't. Thus, the conundrum. It's all tricks of light and angles. There is no other solar system once your children are born. They will have theirs, too, but yours will be encircled eventually. And this, I think, is what is supposed to be.