There is a boy who looks at you

There is a boy looking at you.

No one tells you about that.

Everyone tells you to enjoy it, that he flies by.

They all warn you about sleepless nights, they advise you on methods so that you don't spend the whole day

and to deal with tantrums.

They anticipate how much your kidneys will hurt when he starts walking and the illusion that will make you see him taking his first steps.

But no one warns you that suddenly there is a child looking at you.

Those who don't have children, who when you become a father feel, God knows why, obliged to explain to you why they don't, or not yet, sometimes tell you that it's a lot of responsibility, as if you weren't checking it in own meat.

As if you weren't beginning to intuit, with newly released fatherhood, that bringing a creature into the world means, mainly, trying not to kill it.

Do not eat any air freshener of those that are plugged in, do not throw it out of any window, do not stick, like my friend Álvaro did when he was a kid, one lip to another with Super Glue.

Don't let the motorcycle crash, don't let them do anything to you on the way home, don't let anyone fall in love with you.

A son is like having something always on fire.

Xacobe Casas said it and his friend Jabois has repeated it several times.

But, of all the responsibilities that parenthood entails, the one that no one ever talks about is that there is a child looking at you.

There is a child who looks at you and will see you laugh and cry, get angry and sad, hopeful and disappointed.

With others, with him and with yourself.

There is a child who looks at you and who will learn by looking at you, and not by your long explanations or by his Values ​​subject, what respect is and what forgiveness is.

What is love, but also anger.

There is a child who looks at you and will see you hit the target, but also send the dart to hell.

He will be an eyewitness to your crises with your partner, with faith and with yourself.

When the time comes, he will be proud and ashamed of what he sees, because one day the child who looks at you will become a teenager and will hold you accountable for not being what he thought you were: golden.

Later, if you are lucky, he will become an adult and will ask himself for having judged you only as a father, ignoring that before he arrived you were only human, and that, in fact, that is what you continue to be for the rest. of the world.

That, as you told him the first time he won football so he wouldn't play the pimp, you're also mortal.

One day, the voyeur will discover that, as Pedro Herrero says, who was the only person who warned me that being a mother meant that a child would look at you, life goes in a, but also in b.

And if he has a customs-declarable part, but another that he doesn't want anyone to find out about because he's likely to repudiate, so do you.

Thus, even knowing your life in b, he will ignore it and believe, angelico, that you do not do exactly the same with his, but that he has managed to hide it.

You will get wrinkles, and the child who looks at you will still be there.

By then, he will have understood that this is also what the family is about: to assume the fine print.

Perhaps —hopefully— he will make you a grandfather, and thus he will also understand that one becomes a father to realize what a bad son he has been.

That and the most beautiful of responsibilities: to be, not while, but because there is a child looking at you.

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