the way the dust motes caught the sun in the minivan, making the leftover glitter from some long-forgotten craft project shimmer, pulled me back to this strange flicker of a memory of another me, a person whose hands felt completely different, whose mental space wasn't occupied by the precise geometry of a thrown toy or the exact temperature of a bath. that person, who I scrolled past moments ago in a photo from before any of this chaotic beauty, had a kind of expansive unknowing, a pure emptiness where these daily demands now slot themselves with such an absolute, relentless precision. there’s a strange, almost amused recognition now when I think of that pre-parent self, a sense of, 'oh, sweetie, you had no idea,' but not in a pitying way, more like a gentle, profound understanding of the transformation, because the person i am now, the one whose arches ache from another run-in with a rogue plastic block, whose peace is not fractured by a half-eaten sandwich or a sudden shrill whine, that person feels so much more... substantial, so truly present in a way i couldn't have imagined.