Jumping from stone to stone--trying to live in the moment.

I'm trying to live in the moment, to keep up with my child, but it's difficult. Max leaps from this emotion to that with alacrity, his whole being focused purely on the experience directly in front of him. Whatever may have happened just before is already forgotten, pushed to the side by a new feeling. Max in action is like someone jumping from stone to stone in a river, all attention on the rock that he's balancing on now.

Overjoyed to see me one moment when I pick him up from preschool, for example, outraged and slapping me full in the face one second later for reasons often unknown (perhaps his teacher opened the classroom gate for him to walk through, rather than pick him up and hand him over, as expected?). Skip to a few moments later, and he's now shrieking in the car, completely inconsolable ("I DON'T LIKE YA! I DON'T LIKE YA! GO RUN AWAY!"). Within minutes we are back home and Max turns a bright red face up at me and cheerfully asks if he can help with the dinner, the tears still not dry on his cheeks. When I say yes, my own eyes full, he dances to the kitchen, all sweetness and light.

Unlucky for him, unlucky for us, I'm not built this way. While I try to pull it together quickly in order to appreciate the joyful, connected moments, a part of me is still back at that preschool, grief-stricken that yet another unreachable moment has happened, and all too aware that their frequency seems to be increasing.

In contrast to my stone-jumping son, my memory is like an endless prairie, each experience rolling seamlessly into the next, all moments connected into one continuous whole and easily recalled. Ask me to remember what it was like to be eight-, eleven-, fifteen-, or thirty-one-years-old, and bingo, bango, I'm there. Whether the emotions and experiences are completely accurate is irrelevant; what matters to me is how they feel, and how they feel is immediate and true, full of colour and shadow.

Hence, while I'm thankful that Max seems able to recover from his internal explosions with aplomb and return to his sunny self, I find myself starting to drown in the accumulating fears and sorrows that I experience whenever he leaps onto a more jagged stone. Will the violent outbursts get worse? Will he ever become aggressive towards people outside his family? To other children? Will his unreachable moments stop being like small stones in a river to be jumped across and instead grow into endless ridges of impenetrable rock?

So yes, I'm trying to live in the moment, to keep up with my often affectionate and joyful child, but sometimes I just can't seem to make the leap.