I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(24)
I knew what brand of car seat to buy and how to wash his blankets in dye-free soap and how to make the temperature of his bathwater match the exact heat of his skin. But there was so much I didn’t know. I had never felt such desperate not-knowing.
For instance, I didn’t know when I quit my full-time job if that was the right thing to do. I hoped staying home with him would be an A+ move. (Lots of child-rearing books said it was, but then I read an article about “helicopter parenting.” Was I doing that already?) Although those early months were everything everyone told me that time would be like—amazing, exhausting, surreal—I felt a little whiplashed, too, having slammed on the productivity brakes so abruptly. At the end of every day, when all I had to show for myself were four peed-on onesies, six diapers, and three and a half hours of sleep, what did those numbers mean? Was I doing a good job? I had a habit of stacking the baby laundry in neat piles on the breakfast table and leaving it there until John got home, just so he’d see some quantifiable proof of my industriousness, like a three-dimensional cotton bar graph. I remember going over to my desk in the kitchen one morning and pulling the abandoned spiral-bound carcass of my work calendar out from under a pile of unopened mail. I found a blank page and scrawled “TAKE SHOWER” in shaky handwriting. Then I showered, put on leggings and a T-shirt, and walked back into the kitchen, wet hair dripping, and crossed it out.
I felt ashamed when I found myself wishing for just an hour of my old life back. Not that I’d give up my baby, not for a second—I just wanted to hit pause, to leave myself and my baby frozen in an embrace with the clock stopped, while I left my present body, inhabited my past self, and visited a life of good sleep and clean clothes and lunch in public and adult conversation. A time machine, I thought. That’s all I need.
* * *
I did not know, in those first days, that once you have children, the passage of time feels different than it did before. Everyone says this, and it’s true: Days with young children feel four hundred hours long, but years flash by in seconds. I had no idea I’d become one of those parents who posts pictures along with clichéd captions like “And just like that . . . he’s ten!” or “Wasn’t she a baby just yesterday?” I know, barf. But it was just yesterday that my baby boy got so excited about a jar of creamed spinach that he knocked it out of my hands and sent it clattering across his high-chair tray and onto the kitchen floor. I did just give birth to my daughter last week. How can they be looking back at me with such grown-up faces right now?
(If you’re reading this book in the future, when time machines exist and my children have long since left the nest and moved away, come back and tell me: Did I survive their leaving or did my heart stop?)
* * *
I couldn’t have predicted or understood how much the start of a baby’s life warps an adult’s perception of her own childhood. Suddenly my own spelling bees and birthday parties and childhood feuds seemed farther in the past than they did before. It was like a dial turned, and—click—a new human had appeared at the beginning of the timeline and I was bumped forward a notch into the old-human slot. Yet somehow the opposite felt true as well. When your child is four, you remember things about being four that you hadn’t remembered since. My mother got toys out of storage for my son that I had played with, and when I saw them sitting in front of me on the rug, I felt dizzy. If that wooden duck with the paint flecked off its back where little-me once rammed it into a wall can exist right here in front of right-now-me, then surely little-me also still exists and is sitting right here, invisible, with us. It’s as if someone put a stitch in time, pulled the thread taut, and yanked a minute from decades ago into the present.
In those moments, it feels as if I actually do have a time machine, and it’s stuck on a random setting, flinging me back and forth, keeping me present in every stage of life I’ve experienced. In my mind, I am every person I have ever been. I’m six and the reigning queen of the spelling bee. I’m a teenager, dreaming of a flat in Paris while cursing the flatness of my chest. I’m a terrified new member of the workforce, straight out of college sporting three mix-and-match suits and a briefcase with the tag still on. I’m a freshly stitched-up, squishy mess, home with my infant and drunk on baby love.
Being aware of all these versions of me makes me feel both the presence and absence of all the people I have never been, too. I’m the girl who stayed single and lives in New York and stops at the bodega down the street on my way home every night to get only what I need for my own dinner. I’m a veterinarian. I’m a hermit. I’m Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s third gal pal, and we write movies together on my screened porch. People say friendships don’t work in threes, but we prove them all wrong.
These potential selves exist as surely as my past selves do and as truly as the real, right-now self does, too. They happen to live just on the other side of an unseen line—the boundary between past and present, or the border between real and imaginary—but they are there.
One of the things I tell nervous young pregnant friends, when they confide that they’re freaking out, is not to worry—life happens in phases. You parent a baby, then you parent a toddler, then you parent a kid, and so on. You don’t have to know everything about every phase the minute they’re born. What I don’t say is that this phase thing also sucks. Each phase is all-consuming and then over. A time machine would let us slip out of one phase and visit another, live all our lives, be all our selves. A little of this, then a little of that. I can’t stand the “or” part of life; I prefer “and.” I want to spend a day with my thirteen-year-old daughter and then a day with her as a baby and then a day being a thirteen-year-old myself. I want to be a preschooler again and I want to be a retiree, both for a little while, now.