On the other hand, experiencing rare, brief flashes of identity dissociation is normal and healthy. Like a kind of person-specific jamais vu, sometimes those we know best appear -- for a fleeting pepsisecond -- to be strangers.

"Oh yeah," it occurs to you; "my buddy is just some guy."

These glimmers of anti-revelation can be disconcerting, to say the least, when your wife or your brother or your mother seems somehow sinister. But, if the object of your dissociation of your own child, you're treated a special perspective you can often appreciate intellectually but seldom viscerally: that your child is just some guy.

That kid is a person. Yes, even a stranger. Someone thinking and feeling things you will never know except by the clumsiest of bridges; someone wholly separate from you, whom you imagine you can fathom but you realize, with a Capgras hiccough, the extent to which you are blinded by procreative conceit.

You feel so close to them. It's hard when you recognize you don't possess them.

For fleeting instants you can see them in there -- the person inside your kid -- and it's a heady melange of hope and fear. They're just as free as you are, and available to the same mistakes. Like you, a fool. Like you, vulnerable. Like you, ridiculous and dignified; noble for the wrong reasons, frustrated for all the right ones, flapping through time in pursuit of luck and satisfaction.

You blink it away. It feels too real to keep in active memory.