Let's Hide in Plain Sight

The game always begins the same way. Nico appears with a blanket bunched in his arms and a plan already fully formed: Let's hide!

Not hide me. Let's. Because phase one is a joint operation — the two of us, crammed under a blanket together, hiding from Daddy. It does not matter that Daddy is at work. It does not matter that Daddy has no idea this game is happening — that we are, at this very moment, waiting to be found by a man who does not know he is seeking. Nico is certain he'll come. Any minute now. So we wait, giggling, under the blanket, for a search party of one that will never be dispatched.

I should mention that it gets extremely warm under there.

The logic of a two-year-old

I have to explain the reasoning, because it genuinely takes my breath away.

There are two impossible things Nico believes at once, and he believes them completely. The first: that Daddy — absent, unaware, across town — is somehow part of a game he doesn't know exists. The second arrives when he decides it's his turn and says, with great and unexpected politeness, Mommy, can you hide me please — the belief that being under a blanket makes him gone.

Because when the blanket's over his eyes and the world goes soft and dark and woolen, he can't see me. And if he can't see me, then obviously I can't see him. His not-seeing and my not-seeing are the same fact. There's one point of view in the room, and it's his. If it's hidden from him, it's hidden. Full stop. Feet and all.

He hasn't yet learned the strange, complicated truth that I'm a separate person with my own set of eyes, currently aimed at a giggling lump with two bare feet sticking out the bottom. There's a name for the milestone — theory of mind — but he hasn't reached it yet. Right now he lives in a world where covering his own eyes covers everyone's, and where Daddy comes running from a game he was never told about.

It's the same beautiful limitation I keep bumping into lately. The same little mind that can't imagine I might love the wind on my side of the car can't imagine I'm looking right at him. He isn't being silly. He's being exactly, precisely his age. And his age, it turns out, is enchanting.

The find

Then — hidden, invisible, entirely certain of it — he peeks out from under the blanket and says, Mommy, can you find me please?

And the pretending begins.

I do not underplay it. Now where could Nico have gone? I check behind the curtain he is not behind. I peer under the coffee table he is not under. I may, depending on the day, interrogate the dog. The blanket-mound quivers with the effort of staying quiet — an effort it is losing, badly, because it is laughing.

And then I whip the blanket back and gasp like the laws of physics have been suspended. He shrieks. He has, after all, just pulled off the greatest disappearing act in human history. Again, he says. So we do it again. And again. And — you're sensing the format — again.

What I'm not ready for

Here's the thing I know, sweating gently under a blanket, waiting for a daddy who isn't coming: none of this lasts.

One ordinary day he's going to figure out the trick. He'll realize I could see him the whole time, that the gasp was theater, that his feet were narrating the whole performance from under the curtain. He'll work out that Daddy can't find us if Daddy doesn't know we're hiding. He'll learn that other people have their own eyes, their own minds, their own view of him — and he'll never again believe that closing his eyes closes the world.

Which is exactly what I want for him. It's how he'll grow into someone who can imagine how another person feels. I'm rooting for it.

I'm also, quietly, not ready for it.

So I keep playing along — with his game, and with time. Pretending the blanket still works. Pretending Daddy's on his way. Pretending I might, this once, not find him.

I always find him. Two little feet, giving him away, every time. And long after he's outgrown all of it, I hope he keeps the one true thing underneath: that whenever he asked to be found, he was.

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If the small, disappearing moments are your favorite part of this whole strange, tender job too — come sit with me a while. I send a note like this most Fridays: The Human Note, weekly-ish, no spam, just the little true things. Join the list →