Aware

To be human is to be, or rather to become, self-aware.  Some refine it, some are content with what awareness arises in us, some wish to or even succeed in losing it again.  But none of us are born aware, and watching awareness form is one of the more interesting parts of being a parent.  It is also, at times, distressing.

I know Gideon better than anyone on earth, myself not excepted.  I am his closest parent, his closest fellow being, and to me, examined up close, he seems extraordinary.  I have been the source of his greatest challenges (and, not incidentally, him of mine) and I am the source of his ultimate comfort.  It is for this latter reason, and because Talia had had her try, that I took him in the throes of his most recent tantrum.

To me a tantrum appears to be a short-circuiting of the brain, a total overload of the circuits.  It is unmistakably an intensely unpleasant experience for the child, but I have wondered several times in watching Felix go through one whether he, in the throes of this possession, was actually aware of being possessed, or if the experience consumed him so completely as to leave no room for self-consciousness.  On more than one occasion as he began to come out of it Felix would, heartbreakingly, make it clear he wished this was not happening to him, and soon thereafter it no longer would be.

Enter the Gid.  He has tantrumed already several times, and has built his tantrums to a level that rivals anything Felix has ever displayed.  With him, as with Felix, I find myself wondering what, if anything, he is thinking when in one, but mostly I just sit there praying for it to end and wracking my brain for a distraction vivid enough to snap him out of it.  Failing that it's just a matter of time, and this time that's all I had for him.  The tempest passed, I took a picture of him, and this is what he looked like:

Exhausted, my baby boy, just utterly exhausted.  And then something strange happened.  He asked to see the photo I'd just taken.  Wanting to give him whatever I had to give, I showed it to him, whereupon he immediately burst into tears, sobbing as though his little heart was going to break.  And this is what that looked like then:

Why were you crying, Gideon?  Did seeing your worn out little face give you a glimpse of what you'd just been through?  Did you feel sorry for yourself?  It's impossible to know, and you did not tell me, but I thought then and think now that somehow, at that moment, you passed a milestone on the road to awareness, and maybe passed it sooner than I would have wished you to.