My mother noticed first.
On a clear day, one of the clear days, she was holding the baby and she looked up and said: she has your eyes. And then she looked at me and she looked at the baby and she said: and mine. And she was right. There is something in the shape of them, in the particular way they track movement, already purposeful, already watchful in the specific watchful way that seems to run in us, the watching that is how we have always understood the world before we had the words for it.
Four generations of eyes in one room.
I stood there and felt the line of it, the actual physical line, the specific genetic thread that runs from my mother’s face through mine and into my child and now into this new child who is just beginning to understand that there is a world worth watching. The thread is visible. You can see it in the photographs if you put them side by side, which I have done, which is a thing that grandmothers apparently do, I have become a woman who puts photographs side by side looking for family resemblance and finding it and feeling something about the finding that I do not have a word for but that sits somewhere between pride and grief and gratitude and wonder.
She is going to be a watcher.
I can already see it. The way she tracks the ceiling fan and the window and the face that comes into her field of vision, the way the watching has intention in it already, even now, even this young, the eyes of a person who is going to pay attention to the world, who is going to notice things, who is going to make meaning out of what she sees in her particular and unrepeatable way.
I hope someone tells her, someday, that the watching is a gift.
That the noticing is a gift. That being the kind of person who pays attention is worth the cost of it, which is sometimes considerable, which is sometimes the full price of being in a world that offers more than you can hold. It is worth it. The watching is worth it. I would tell her now but she is four months old and the words are years away.
My mother is watching her watch the ceiling fan.
Three women watching. This is what the line looks like. This is where it goes. I am so glad to be in the middle of it.
