on time
Author’s note: This originally was published as a TinyLetter on October 16.
My son is asleep in the living room. He passed out mid-crawl, worn out from a morning spent chasing the cat and playing with a stuffed tiger, a wooden spoon, and a stack of gnawed-on books. I checked on him after taking a quick shower and found him sprawled peacefully facedown on the rug, his toes pointed inward, my husband flopped on the couch next to him.
Then I picked up my laptop and headed immediately into the dining room to write.
The last time I wrote you was on August 2, 2015. Since then, I’ve given birth, started a new job, and both struggled with and celebrated being a working mama who is head of household. I’ve learned there are no real off-hours anymore, not with a baby; that I’m capable of more than I expected; that having a child would be a simultaneous making and unmaking of me. I’m new, and I’m relearning myself. My husband, I know, feels somewhat similarly. Everything changes.
What has been hardest, perhaps, is making the time to do things other than parenting, working, and doing housework. My writing largely has been shelved. In the rare moments when I have had time to write — dedicated, carved-out time relieved from other duties for this specific purpose — I’ve found myself browsing the web for shoes and pants that fit (my postpartum body is still shifting, one year later), poking around Instagram for interesting artists and hand-lettered journals, and staring out my apartment windows. The most writing I’ve been able to do with any regularity is tapping out my 19-syllable poems. (These may seem not to bear considerable weight, but truthfully, they require careful thought and creativity.)
And occasionally I grumble. I curse inwardly at my inability to get even a half hour to put pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard. Sometimes I cast my mind into the future and think longingly of my son being able to care for himself, take himself to the bathroom, and put himself to bed, so I can deliver myself quietly and completely to words.
And yet — there he is, cackling happily on his hands and knees, chasing me around the hardwood floors in a game of tag. There he is, scattering colorful blocks under the couch and scaring the cat into a mighty leap over the baby gate. There he is, climbing firmly into my lap, his arms around my neck in a loose but purposeful hug, so we can watch Kung Fu Panda together while my husband cooks dinner.
It’s not a question of which brings me more joy or fulfillment. It’s not a question of how to split my time between the people and desires that demand it. It’s a question of rhythm, of ebb and flow, of a tide turning inside and outside myself, all tuned toward the development of my son’s growing life while I recognize the somersaulting of my own.
I work as a program manager, which means I focus acutely on deadlines, deliverables, and people, and fitting the three together as best as possible in a practical, sensible, and forward-moving way. I had thought this skill set, finely honed in 18 years of experience, would be useful as a mother — that I would bring these grounded and sharp sensibilities to my new work as a parent who still wanted to create, a home-tender who did not want to lose ground to bins of baby toys, and a mother who was recovering from the heavy magic of sharing her body with a newborn. I thought this expertise would give me better odds at succeeding and not melting down over the prismatic difficulties of being responsible for a tiny life.
Some of this is true. Certainly my skills have found a new flexing in application to seemingly mundane acts like keeping baby food and diapers and appropriately-sized onesies in stock. But there was no way to know what this surrender would be like — how it would feel to have someone say, “Life as you know it is gone,” and for me to respond, willingly, “I know, and I accept it.”
It has been an abdication not of self, but of self-expectation.
Losing the time to be myself, and in so doing, losing myself, was the greatest fear I bore coming into motherhood. It was perhaps the greatest factor in not believing I might want to be a mother until I was 35 years old. Yet while I still need time alone to stay closer to my center, I can see I was only partly right.
I don’t have the time I wanted. I have the time I was unsure I wanted — tucked into pockets, filled with hastily scribbled words and my son’s curiously wide eyes that follow me, adoring and laughing, throughout the day.
It is beautiful in its own way, and if only for now, it is enough.
For the curious, I began writing this dispatch at 12:17 p.m. on September 18. I completed it at 10:12 p.m. on October 15, after my son went to bed for the night, and sent it at 11:01 a.m. on October 16, while my son napped. Pockets of time, indeed.
