At child's checkup, a curtain opens
WE WENT TO the doctor's recently. The three of us are all 10 years older than when we first met, though the doctor and my little girl don't seem bothered by it. Each winter we reconvene for her annual physical exam. Two new dots extend the curving growth charts he keeps; she allows him to check for potatoes in her ears, bends forward for him to trace her spine, and waits for the same declaration at the end. The state of her union, according to this doctor who pronounced her perfect when she was less than 24 hours old, is excellent. I am pleased to hear this. The country under review is even more pleased to hear there will be no shots until the seventh grade.
Our doctor still keeps paper records, which allow him to look us in the eye without an interfering monitor, and also to house the keepsakes he has received through the years. As he was flipping through the chart, a piece of lined paper, folded erratically, dropped out. He unfolded it and turned it around to face us. I looked on with pride; the plastic a child paints is stained glass to her mother. My little girl looked on with only half an eye, since she sees her earlier incarnations as lesser selves.
It was a drawing from preschool. I recognized the era immediately -- her angel phase. A figure had its arms spread wide; they filled the sheet. Orange wings floated from her back. She was smiling beatifically. Her eyes were blue. Her gown was silver. Her face was purple.
I loved that era; inspiration came at a furious pace, and preschool supplies could hardly meet artistic demand. Each day there was a bouquet of drawings waiting by pickup time, many signed the same way: FOUR MOM. Back then the work was so constant that it was nothing to give a picture away to the wonderful man who had declared her perfect. Art still comes easily these days. But looking at the purple cheeks, fresh and timeless between the covers of the medical chart, I felt a covert urge to glance both ways, snatch the piece from its frame and make off with the Mona Lisa. I didn't.
Instead, I turned to my little girl. "I remember that angel," I said. "I remember exactly when you drew that, don't you?"
I knew she would, she had loved it so much. But she shook her head no. She didn't remember the angel.
It was a startling moment. From the sudden distance of a decade -- it happened as quickly as time travel -- I looked upon the two of us sitting in the doctor's office. Same office, changed child, of course.
In the beginning, she kicked in her car seat on the doctor's floor, then she wiggled in my lap; now she sits in her own chair, perishing if I slide my hand into hers, and no longer remembers the angel. After 10 years, she is old enough for me to have memories of her life that she no longer has herself.
Someday, the opposite may be true; she may have memories of my life that I no longer have.
An elderly friend of mine has watched her husband grow demented. They live apart because he requires skilled care, but she visits him each week. She tries to reminisce (as the books recommend), but the stories they used to share in early old age, about the things they did together in their youth, no longer serve as the bridge between them. They once had memories of the same life. Now, without his corroboration, my friend says she has lost the sense of having lived that life herself. The better half of her past is gone. She is not given to overstatement. "It's a little lonely," she says, when someone else might add: This is the flood that has wiped away my home.
We are nowhere near that flood, sitting on dry land in the doctor's office. We are utterly happy in the present; the state of the union is still perfect, and if she can't recall an old angel here or there, it is because life is so full, not because it is empty.
But sometimes, curtains one is too busy to notice open for a brief instant. Before they close, we are startled into seeing the possibility of what lies beyond. It will require courage.
Elissa Ely is a psychiatrist. 
