There are things children know
that parents will never understand.

Odder still, things a person knows
as a child are forgotten in adulthood.

A child measures the success of a day
by the duration of the parent
demanded bath at its end.

A child know that boundaries, especially
those parentally set, are flexible
and you don’t know where
the limit is until you cross it.

Presents are not special, they are
expected periodically, and only
a parent imagines that Santa
would ignore a child no matter
how “bad” the child had been.

But happily, when a parent
crosses the boundary into the land
of grandparenting, somehow
the knowledge of the child
is refound, very often accompanied
by one or more conspiratorial winks.