Attending

Walking home the other day, I was passed by an SUV driven by a woman who was chatting on her cell phone and, I'd guess, her teenaged son, who was pecking away at the keypad of some electrogadget. How sad, I reflexively thought: a parent and child within two feet of each other, but each temporarily ignoring the other and engaged in a dialogue with absent partners. But then I mulled on it a little longer - walking the three miles home from the library allows that - and started to think that maybe there was an element of grace, of rightness, in the scene as well. After all, each was doing what they wanted, with no apparent friction or resentment. A laissez- faire society, in the cozy confines of a car.

In the days since, the scene's recurred to me a few times. When I'm sitting Cleo, as today, the most basic challenge is to try to read her mood, and to accommodate: a hungry baby needs to be fed, and a wet diaper, if it's not changed, has a way of sublimating into something considerably more grotesque. But as she's growing older (the four-month mark, folks, is just around the corner), there are also moments where reading her mood means respecting her individualism. Today she played with the low-hung rack of toys on her play seat for a good 15 minutes, and although my inclination was to interrupt her - how can anyone fumble with two plastic disks for that long without getting bored? - letting her go turned out to be the best thing I could do. She played happily, quietly, absorbedly.

The point? A simple one. We may want to be perfect parents, always there and always at our child's side. But sometimes being a good parent, it seems, means stepping aside. The space between a mother and child isn't always a cold one; it can also be filled with trust.