There is only a tiny window of time with our kids when the clock moves slowly. Impossibly slow, when you hold a newborn, feeding it, gazing at it with wonderous awe. You marvel at little toes, lost in a haze of Oxytocin, washing over you like a fairy tale spell (there for your protection as well as the baby’s). This haze spills into a blur, when you feed, bathe, sleep, feed, bathe, sleep. You occasionally eat something, ravenous, and fall into bed for a few hours of rest, before re-starting the process. Your body breaks down; gives in to the fact that you are no longer its sole owner. Now, there are two that own this body. Time shifts in waves of sand you can hear, like rain against the window, which you have heard a thousand times but only actually hear just now. You feel wind, because your baby does, startled by a sudden gust, eyes widening with uncertainty.
The world becomes intimate, rooms in the house hold new meaning. The bed is your friend and your enemy, the bedroom is full of losses, as your lover becomes a Dad and there is no rule book for any of this. The bathroom is now your escape, where you can cry into the tub and no one is the wiser because you are wet anyway. The living room is your cage where you pace with a screaming newborn, wondering how you can cover so much ground and still never be anywhere else. Time holds you hostage, at that point, your personal tormentor.
Without any notice, they are up, holding onto tables and talking and escaping and then walking, holding your hand. You know this is fleeting and you must hang on to it but you cannot, because time is supposed to speed up, this is the way of it. You have another baby, re-start the process. Again you get to savor in small moments: tiny fists pulling up grass, dandelion fuzz blown into the air, the baby shrieking with delight. You still never sleep but the trade-off is listening to crickets again, listening to the language of bees and creaking pines. You know that this world will be lost to you as soon as they can run, so you try to listen, try to record in your mind what the weight of a small body is on your chest as you breathe in and out.
Suddenly, everyone is up and running amok. The car is larger and more shit is acquired and you are a human whirling dervish, with two fast talking, fast walking kids that still stop to look at bugs, but only for mere seconds, before they are processing some new thing or learning a new word or figuring out emotions. Your mind holds not one message but fifty, as you sort their days and yours and your future days and what meals will be eaten and what parks will be visited and who forgot to pack the snacks, damn.
And then you get a glimpse, again. A window opens and your child is there, and so are you, and you both recognize it. You feel the wind again and the sun and there are no cicadas but you hear their noise anyway, a barely discernible buzzing, reminding you that if you do not slow down for this moment, the next one may not come, or come in a year, or when they are in high school, or when you are old and slightly wiser, trying to tell them to savor in the small moments, because they have no idea how quickly they pass.