Being in the moment

It is an hourly, daily, weekly whirlwind here and I am stepping out of it briefly.
I am stepping out of it because one of those future flashes happened, and time has to slow down a moment.
You know the future flash. Anyone with a child knows it.
It happens when a small child grows right before your eyes, and through some quirk of expression you glimpse the person they will become.
This week it happened to me with Cole.
I looked at Cole and saw for an instant the teenager that he will be.
And I was entranced. I stared. I took a picture, trying to capture that glimpse and trap it to be studied.
I fell in love with him all over again, just the way it happens when the bundled helpless wee one becomes your very own. I fell in love with him the way I imagine other girls will do, when that age comes around, and he figures out more fully just how charming he is.
A mother and a son.
It's a possessive sort of thing, a proud love that adores and swells to say "I made this, and just look at him."
In that moment, all the parental annoyances, grumbling and moods fall away and the speedy continuity of time stands clear. Wasn't I just cradling him, learning his face?
We all carry it within our grasp, that ability to see through the child, back to the newborn. The neonate. The fetus. The moment it became a reality.
The future flash gives the opposite. It teases. It torments. What will that future hold, and why am I not ready for it?
It makes me want to smell his head, as though he were still fresh from God and new in my arms. It makes me need to kiss that tender neck just beneath his ear.
The future flash is bittersweet.
I am enticed and yet slamming the brakes on time's march.