i knew you when

On Saturday afternoon, I found myself at one end of our couch, quietly observing three generations of men squeezed together, absorbed in their various pursuits. Next to me was Gabriel, rapt and motionless, listening to Mike's dad reading a story. At the far end sat Mike, puzzling over conic sections for his math class.

I was taken by the strangest, most vivid notion as I watched them. Maybe it was the ripped cargo pants, maybe it was something about the way he was holding his back and head at attention. Suddenly Gabriel was a big teenager in my mind's eye. I could see his long limbs and strong brown neck, his graceful motions and intent way of listening. And when I looked at Mike pouring over his math homework, oblivious to my presence, jutting out his lower lip and furrowing his brow in concentration? There he was, as a child. I saw him the first time math was hard. He was thin and awkward and beautiful; his look of troubled yet determined concentration spoke volumes. Mike's dad Charlie was the still center connecting them. 

Have you ever had an experience like this? When, unbidden, you are struck with a vivid sense of what someone you love was once like, or what they might be like in the distant future? 

I often feel grateful for the fact that Mike and I have been able to grow up together; we met when I was seventeen years old, and fell in love when I was twenty. We were so young! And yet we weren't children. This might sound nuts, but I have also felt the absence of intimacy with Mike-as-child as a source of grief. I don't even know if I miss having been children together; I just miss having known him then. Who was that little boy who jumped for joy watching the 1980 World Series, who sat with Sister Dennis in the hall outside his second grade class doing advanced-level reading work, who played football in Christopher Ropertus' backyard? (And how could he have gone about daily life as if everything was just fine? He didn't even know me!)

Watching my dear ones quietly, unintentionally suggest who they were and who they will be got me thinking about an under-appreciated dimension of love. We often think of loving the whole person. You could call it spatial - loving all of someone, all of their scattered bits. But could we also think of loving someone temporally, across time? 

Mike once explained to our dear friend Edith how he knew he was ready to marry me: though he didn't know who I would become in the future, he knew he would love that person. We love people at every moment of their unfolding, every moment of growing into themselves. When I see pictures of my mother as a child, my heart flies to her. I love that little girl. And my father, who died so young? I sometimes imagine him as he would be now. It is not so hard to do, conjuring a fifty-nine year old Dad. I don't know the details, but I know I love him. 

In the same way I am getting to know eight year old Mike better all the time. I am getting to know and love the people my children are growing into, too. Sometimes I see flashes of an older person expressed in Gabriel's baby face. I hear a tone of voice that belongs to a much older person accidentally slip out of Frances. Little hints of what is to come. 

Love draws us towards that most essential center of a person, that mysterious and ultimately unknowable core. It is the you-ness of you that I love. Yet that you-ness travels through the most varied landscapes and circumstances. It is expressed in an infinite number of ways, each of them compelling. Sometimes you are infuriating, sometimes you are inspiring, sometimes you elicit the deepest tenderness in me. Sometimes you are a child, and sometimes you are very old. All of these expressions point to that you-ness I love so dearly, and in that way they are precious.

Could it be that true intimacy allows us a partial, shadowed view of the entirety of another person's life? The seed, the shoot, the root, the tree? The person they were, are, and will be? With our children in particular, it is easy to say we love them always. We love them backwards and forwards. Though they came from outer space, though they surprise and baffle and refuse categorization, in loving them, I am yearning to know them. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.