`Time goes by so fast. Before you know it, your children will will be grown.”
To every well-meaning person offering this cliche to mothers of small children like myself I wish to explain that for me tempus does not fugit. It crawls at times.
There is a time warp at my address. And it is The Mommy Zone.
I’m convinced my children are aging in dog years; for each year they age, seven years really have passed. Weldon, my older son, has just turned 5. That’s 35 years to you and me. So he believes that he and I are the same age and that he is my peer. Brendan is 2 and has been for what seems like 14 years of normal, linear time. At times he is as confrontational as a teenager, except that he sits in a car seat and must be carried to bed.
I often feel that if you charted my life as a mother on a time line, this early childhood stage would take up at least 70 percent of it, stretching out like the paleolithic era or the Dark Ages. Maybe once the boys are in school and allow me to go to the bathroom without interruption, time in our house will pass as quickly as the decades since the discovery of electricity or the new age of machines.
Time crawls within our house because each day spent with my boys can be divided into dozens of modules of activity.
Beginning at 5:30 a.m. (5:45 on dark, rainy days) the boys combust with aggressive interaction. This usually involves a battle over who has the best superhero toy with the most harmful-if-swallowed accessories. By 6 a.m., beds are made, boys are dressed, teeth are brushed and we move downstairs so I can make the breakfast they’d rather not eat. As it is too early for most children’s TV programming, they fight in the family room over which tape to put in the VCR.
After breakfast, at about 6:30 a.m., we move to the basement, the boys’ fantasy playroom. Knowing there are no stores, libraries or museums open at this hour, I design a careful agenda for them, enticing them to draw, paint, sculpt, read books with me or perhaps put on a play with any of the dozen puppets I’ve made out of old socks. The capes are in the “pretend corner” for an instant superhero battle. By 7:30, we have used 363 battery-operated toys and $185 worth of Legos are scattered over a 30-foot radius.
I’ve had plenty of time to craft my theory of the Mommy Zone because of the angst-filled eternities I have spent cradling Weldon in a steamy bathroom during a croup episode and waiting in the quiet dark for Brendan’s fever to go down. Drinking watery coffee in a hospital waiting room while your child is in surgery can put decades between the drive there and the drive home. Searching desperately for Weldon when he’s is hiding in the circular clothing racks at a department store can pull the plug on all the clocks.
But life in the Mommy Zone does have its advantages. Brendan’s whispered “I wuv you, Momma” at 4 in the morning as he crawls under the covers next to me can provide enough joy for a week. Weldon chattering about a birthday party or a new friend at preschool can make each laugh last a month. Watching the boys play tackle on the front lawn with their father can appear like glorious suspended animation.
But lately time for me is even slower than its usual limp. Each week feels like a year. Soon our new baby will make his mark on our lives. I am anxious, I am hopeful. And I know that each time I smell his hair or glimpse his body pulsing with breath will be more than enough to make time stand miraculously still. Each day will feel like a glorious forever.
And I am grateful, after all, that for me right now time has a pace all its own.
