This is a photograph of my grandchildren looking out on the Pacific Ocean. They have their backs to us, and that is appropriate. As Kahlil Gibran writes in his poem On Children:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
……..
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
It doesn’t hurt to remember from time to time that our childrens’ and grandchildrens’ eyes are on the future, which stretches past us, especially past grandmothers. What the children will see and experience, we never will know. At some point, they will be on their own, and I can only hope as profoundly as I could ever hope that they will still be standing protectively next to each other.
It doesn’t depress me. I still have a lot to do, like teaching them how to swim….