Or at least, they might be. In our doubling down on all things analogue during the pandemic (e.g. puzzles, charades, listening to records, etc.), my six-year-old has recently taken up roller skating. She practices in the empty lot of a now deserted business park, as our own neighborhood roads are too curvy and hilly for comfort. Watching her learn this new skill has been an unexpected delight. Like a newborn foal, she wobbles and lurches on her impossibly long legs before finding her center of gravity and nosing forward, then backward, and, often enough, straight down. Each time, she gets back up with a kind of relish that I’m beginning to understand, myself.
While the difficulties of pandemic parenting are legion, there are some sweet spots. I’m just not always in the frame of mind to appreciate them. But watching her try, and fail, and try again, to skate the other day reminded me so vividly of her first few steps when she was just learning to walk that my own knees gave a bit. I love every iteration of her, I thought to myself. What’s more, I will. This bearing witness, for I don’t know what else to call it, to her growth and change and fledgling autonomy is one of the incomparable joys of being a parent, and I’m not sure I would have experienced it in quite the same way–if at all–had the world not been knocked sideways by competing crises.
Well, then 