I loved these as a kid and I remember staring at a giant poster board at the mall, crossing my eyes, walking closer and then further away, doing all the tricks to pull the hidden image forward. In fact, my favorite Dave Matthews Band CD cover had a magic eye on it. (Man, does that sentence tell you exactly how old I am?)
I was watching my kids listen to my husband read them a bedtime story this weekend and it occurred to me that parenting is like looking at a Magic Eye. In a moment, you see them- as they are today, here, in this moment- but if you let your eyes relax and go a little blurry, another image appears.
The image of them the day they were born, crying, tiny, shaking.
The image of them at 2 am, when you haven’t slept in what feels like years, and you hold them in your arms, feeling the weight of your love and your hopes and your fears for them, somehow 100 times heavier than the 15 pounds in your arms.
The image of them figuring out that balance thing they have been working on and managing to make their way to you, totering, walking for the first time.
But if you really let your eyes go, you also see this image of their future.
You see them leaving for college, their room you painstakingly decorated time and time again to keep up with their maturing tastes, all packed up with duffle bags.
You see them alone in a big city, meeting you for dinner while you are in town, proud to show off how grown up they are by picking a nice restaurant they can’t afford.
You see them your age now, watching their own family read stories before bed.
And, it breaks you wide open.
And maybe this is the true essence of the Magic Eye: to be able to see, not just what is there, but deeply into what is there and, in doing so, beyond what is there. Maybe the Magic is in the seeing, the noticing, the being aware that, as you sit with your child, today, you are in the presence of all their yesterdays and all their tomorrows.
In the day to day, especially if your child is struggling, there is so much to manage it is easy to miss the image in the Magic Eye. It takes effort. We have to stop, we have to slow down, we have to do that thing where we let our vision get a little blurry and cross our eyes a tiny bit, but if we do it, maybe we can see forever.
As you get into your 2024 and continue to be mindful about how you want to show up for the people you love, perhaps think about your own Magic Eye(s) and ask yourself, “How could seeing this (this situation, this struggle, this hard moment with my child, etc.) in a different way serve me?” And let your eyes go blurry and see what appears.
Let me know what you see.
