When you become a parent you get a ‘do-over’ on many things. Get as excited over cats, dogs, escalators, ambulances, rain and the fact that carrots are orange as your child. Playing with Duplo or those tiny plastic shapes which should represent some kind of domestic animal. Coming up with the most ridiculous food combinations when invited for tea or spaghetti by your child. Watching cartoons you once got up for at 7:00 in the morning because the function ‘on demand’ did not exists. Currently I’m in a spiral of such nostalgic encounters, the latest one added to the repertoire is ‘The Moomins’, -these white crossbreeds which spend their days planning activities into their meal plan instead of the other way around. They still enchant me after 25 years.
All these encounters are like crystal balls to me; I’m catching glimpses of the past. Consciously I long more and more for the time when life seemed easier, simpler. Of course, in these memories I’m the child and not the adult, the everyday struggles my parents faced with raising their kids I don’t see.
Still though, this feeling of longing exists.
But then, in the end of the day when the house grows quiet and the living room is lighted by a single bulb I take Fitzgeralds’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ and once more I read the last sentence:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
and I go to bed expecting to wake up tomorrow and not yesterday.