Walking backward, you can never shake off the fear that the back of your head will suddenly bash into something hard. The skin back there gets very sensitive, and your hair rises. When you can’t stand not being able to see what’s behind you anymore, your skin opens, your hair parts, and a third eye appears.

This mother doesn’t yell, “Cut out this foolishness! Come on, we’re going,” and try to pull her boy along; patiently, she watches him walk backward. With a head full of terms like autonomy, creativity, and the importance of play, she’s probably educating her son in his own free private school. There’s some sarcasm in this interpretation of mine, but to tell the truth, knowing that my own mother must have had bright yet sad days, days like a deserted field lit by sunlight, has put me in a quandary. From the outside, it’s impossible to know all the complicated elements that make up a person’s inner feelings. No one can tell what this mother is really thinking, right at this moment. Maybe something terrible has happened, and she’s too sad to think about supervising her child’s behavior. Or perhaps she’s too smitten with him to concentrate on what he’s doing. She might secretly be hoping he’ll fall down and get what he deserves. Or that she’ll be the center of attention if he takes a tumble and starts crying. After all, there are parents like that. Unable to interpret them, children nevertheless remember all their parents’ looks, gestures, and words, carrying them on their shoulders like the night sky. Then, when they’re old enough to have a couple kids of their own, they put those fragments of memory together as if they were making connections between stars scattered in the sky, forming them into constellations like the Little Dipper or the Great Bear, and, remembering their mothers silently watching them as they walked backward in the snow, they come up with various possibilities as to how she might have felt that day.

Step by step, the boy walked into the endless space behind him. Only children know about these adventures into the unknown, right in the middle of everyday life. I stayed where I was, blocking his path, so he bumped into my stomach and then twisted his head around to look up at me, this time crackling with laughter. He looked happy to have found someone to run into. He certainly wasn’t hoping that nothing would stop him, that he’d keep getting farther and farther away from his mother. The moment I felt the warmth of his body, accepting it with the whole of mine, I felt strangely satisfied. I remembered the way children sometimes run toward their mothers, bumping straight into them just for fun, or that game where a group of kids press back to back in a circle knot, and each one tries to push all the others out.

The boy was still dissolved in laughter, but when his mother called his name, he stopped and ran to her, his shoes smacking the pavement. Mother-and-child time, endlessly repeated. Every day they go shopping. Today, and again tomorrow. And countless more times. Infinite repetitions. But not actually infinite, because they will end someday. The end is coming, nearer and nearer.