Time Flies. Or It Doesn’t

The year after having Simone was one of the hardest of my life. There was a perfect storm of stressors–post-partum lack of sleep, various crises in my family of origin, having a spirited & strong-willed two-year-old, leaving my job, selling a house, moving from said house into a small apartment in a totally new city–and things were not alright with me.

I wanted to enjoy my baby’s infancy & my toddler’s toddlerhood and I could not. As it was, it took everything I had just to get through it. I couldn’t see my way to the other side. I wanted to let myself off the hook for that, but the messages everywhere were that this time of my baby’s life would go by in a wink and I’d regret it if I didn’t savour it, enjoy it, wait until my babies were bigger to clean the house and so forth.

Not that cleaning the house was much of a temptation in those days.

On a particularly difficult day, one of those days when it took all of my energy to get the children from one place to another, when the whining or the crying or the tantrums seemed non-stop, two women walking towards us said, “Oh, you’re so lucky. I think that was the happiest time in my life.”

Oh, Lord, I thought. Let it not be so.

As with labour, which seems to last forever until it’s over, I think the relief of its being over makes you misremember how long it felt & and how difficult. I still have not forgotten, though. And I do not regret my failed attempts to savour every last moment. What I regret is the pressure I put on myself to do a better job of savouring, and the guilt I laid on myself when I failed to do so.

Last week, a blog post was making the rounds about this very issue, about how difficult it is to really enjoy this difficult time. I particularly appreciate the analogy of parenting to climbing Mt. Everest:

Brave, adventurous souls try it because they’ve heard there’s magic in the climb. They try because they believe that finishing, or even attempting the climb are impressive accomplishments. They try because during the climb, if they allow themselves to pause and lift their eyes and minds from the pain and drudgery, the views are breathtaking. They try because even though it hurts and it’s hard, there are moments that make it worth the hard. These moments are so intense and unique that many people who reach the top start planning, almost immediately, to climb again. Even though any climber will tell you that  most of the climb is treacherous, exhausting, killer. That they literally cried most of the way up.

And so I think that if there were people stationed, say, every thirty feet along Mount Everest yelling to the climbers – “ARE YOU ENJOYING YOURSELF!? IF NOT, YOU SHOULD BE! ONE DAY YOU’LL BE SORRY YOU DIDN’T!” TRUST US!! IT’LL BE OVER TOO SOON! CARPE DIEM!”  – those well-meaning, nostalgic cheerleaders might be physically thrown from the mountain.

After I shared the post on Facebook, a friend of mine sent me an essay by Carol Shields, on time passing. From the afterword of Dropped Threads, it gave me comfort and hope. She writes about the admonition given at her graduation from university not to waste time, because it flies. But as her life goes on, she realizes that this is terrible advice & untrue:

Time was not our enemy if we kept it on a loose string, allowing for rest, emptiness, reassessment, art and love. This was not a mountain we were climbing: it was closer to being a novel with a series of chapters.

The mother-of-small-children chapter seemed to go on forever, but, in fact, it didn’t. It was a mere twelve years, over in a flash.

I want the life she speaks of, with ”shallow time and fallow time.” I want to waste time. I want time to pass more quickly during the hard years. Her words, here, give me hope. There is time. Plenty of it.

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