Keeping watch

My three month old daughter is inches away from my face staring at me with unblinking eye contact and experiments with new sounds and facial expressions to communicate with me. She pauses for my response, takes a deep breath and echoes my sounds back at me. While her communication develops and changes on an almost daily basis, I am struck by the realization that she is comfortable with our close and steady eye contact. In fact, it is necessary lest she miss something important about me or her environment that will strike her as something new -- just like her laughter and voice is new to me now. She has yet to become discomfited by our closeness and the intensity of our gaze.

I don't remember myself, my behaviors or my thoughts at a very young age so I cannot comment on what it was like for me -- but I have noticed that some 1 and 2 year old children have already learned that eye contact can be intimidating and uncomfortable and they cope by looking down or away when someone (sometimes even a parent) wants to speak to them closely. By the age of 15, I was already consciously aware of the entirely squirm-inducing experience of holding eye contact. I was brought up as a teenager in a church youth group where hugs, closeness and the words "I love you" were as common as conversation about boys, clothes and music. While I did not feign my genuine love and respect for the friends I made there, I always had to force the closeness we shared. A frequent meditation given in my youth group began by instructing us to find a partner that we did not already know. We would soon discover that we would be looking into said partner's eyes for up to 15 minutes as the central focus of the entire meditation. It was excruciating! Any similar activity -- singing while making eye contact with a partner, hugs at the end of the night, and open "heart talks" in our small groups would prove equally challenging for me. In the past year I was at a weekend retreat where the aforementioned meditation was given and I discovered that even after the four years of practice that I had during high school and the 13 years that have passed since that time in my life began, maintaining intense eye contact -- even with someone I love -- is still probably one of the most uncomfortable and difficult things for me to do. I simply learned how to fake my way through those experiences, the hugs and the I love you's -- which is not to say I didn't mean it when I would say it, it's just to say that it would have been so much easier if I didn't feel I had to say the words out loud or press my heart against another person's heart.

At this same time in my life I was learning how to be on stage, how to compel to a large number of people, how to convey the message of a song or a prepared talk. Most often, I would pick a spot on the opposite wall to sing to or I would dart back and forth between two or three pairs of reasonably comfortable eyes. I soon learned instead to sing to God and began looking up or cloing my eyes. It became comfortable and easy to be relatively open with a large group of people. My voice grew and my confidence as a singer, writer and speaker grew with it. During that same time frame I found myself the subject of a man's gaze which was captivating and encapsulating and slowly the most important thing I knew about myself became whether or not I had his love, his attention, his appreciation. I sought results for my actions not so that I could feel good for me, but so that I could feel deserving of his love and watching eyes. Suddenly, after so many uncomfortable experiences with others, I found the eyes that I could stare into unblinking. I found someone who I didn't have to fake hugs for, someone that I could say aloud that I loved without feeling awkward. As it turns out, there was trouble with this set up.

7 years and many heartaches later, I have discovered that the difficulty in finding these things with only one person is that once that person is gone we will have to completely redefine what we understand ourselves to be. It's incredibly simple to say or to intellectually understand but the reality is that many of us hold these contingent beliefs subconsciously and discovering that they live at the seed level of our every thought and action is an incredibly rude awakening. Now, of course it can no longer matter what he did or didn't want, what he did or didn't do, what we are or aren't or will ever be, it matters only that it is time to reconnect with what is actually important about me, and not what is only important to me if it is important to him.

Now I am a single mom and really, at the deepest level the only thing that has changed about her father and I is that our daughter is watching us now. She is digesting new information about her life, her surroundings and me as her mother every day. I set her down to brush my teeth and after a minute or two of not being able to see me she cries. I pick her up and talk to her and she is content once more. She watches me fold laundry, clean the bathroom, put away clothes amazed and always unblinking, but should I leave her alone in a room for nothing but a minute it seems that her entire sense of security and contentment is threatened. For these precious days, I am her everything. She wakes up to me, she responds to me and I am the last voice and face she experiences before she rests at night. Most of the time there is no other person to pass her to should I become distressed. In the captivation of her gaze I am being forced to revisit the reality that eye contact becomes uncomfortable, it isn't just that way from the beginning. I can only hope that as I meet her needs for security and safety she will learn that a lot of people, not just her mother, are deserving of trust, affection and openness. In the process I am learning the unmatched gift of physical closeness and I am leaning into her infinite affections. If my daughter grows up and chooses consciously or subconsciously to emulate me I want to know that she will be carving out a life filled with deeply trusting relationships, security, integrity and grace. I do not have to seek my daughter's affections because she gives them freely and in so doing frees me to open my heart because it's the right thing to do and not because it will win me some sort of elusive prize.

A stranger this week looked at my infant daughter and summed up my entire point saying, "That is the glance of God." And it is in that unwavering and unblinking glance that I rediscover myself -- not just as a mother, sister, friend, daughter, granddaughter, singer, writer, dog owner, lover of country music, Libra, but as the whole person who is all of those things at once.