Birds* Eye * View

Looking into the mirror this morning I feel a wave of shame come over me. Suddenly I imagine what the baby sees when he looks into my eyes. I can see clearly, what has hurt me is not hidden. What has changed me shows, as years of cigarette smoke turn a lampshade. Though I may be smiling, my eyes reveal another layer of myself that is not smiling, never smiles, or smiles only when it accepts itself for what it is. Rare moments of content when the heaviness I have collected of life drops into every empty crevice of my body, wholly, and I do not resist. How strange to see it, looking into the mirror, into my own eyes, it is there and I can't adjust my eyes to hide it. I am ashamed because I feel it is a weakness that I am not able to muster the strength to clear my eyes of that taint. How hard he looks when he looks into my eyes, as if every part of him were aimed like an arrow for my soul. He has the look of a birdwatcher. Looking through the binocular of innocense, his new lenses, so advanced and magnifying they bring him closer to his subjects than an electronic microscope brings a scientist to the nucleus of a cell. Does he see my anger, fear, repulsion at the injustices I know he will inevitably suffer? I do not want him to see it. I do not want him to see what I have seen and become tainted. I do not want to frighten the birdwatcher away, who is looking for the flight and colors of beauty in the new world around him. Who is looking for the shape of my wings, the color of my breast, my unique behavior in the frantic map of sprouting branches of trees. I know it will be awhile before he can relax and understand that I am wounded and not a threat. Now, as he is only a few months here, he can not understand what that taint means. Maybe one day, while his eyes are glued to the lenses of his binoculars and he is walking through a tall grass and stumbles over a hidden rock and falls into an ant hill...causing him to drop his binoculars and panic...I will come from behind him and lift him from the hill, brush the ants away and his tears...and he will look into my eyes through his tear-blurred vision and understand. In that moment I will hand him his binoculars and tell him it's ok, everything's ok. "Keep looking."