through the children's gate -- adam gopnik

...Check for what? I think secretly. That they are breathing, as Martha does? That they are safe? But what could that mean? Though I tell them they are safe, none of us really knows what safety is, or means, or looks like when it is asleep.

I realize, in the middle of the night, that the love I feel for the children is not at every moment remote enough from the need I feel for them;

all the discipline I attempt to prepare to let them go into their own world, where they make up their own minds and fly away on their own wings, gets lost when I look at them. I want them here, safe, I want them this age forever, I want this situation -- two small children puzzled and, on the whole, happy at home, in a big city, not to change, even though I know that the parent's task is building up and letting go.