Having a baby is not unlike accidentally slipping into a science fiction universe, everything you know is so completely upended. I wrote an essay about how my sense of time shifted out from under me in the first months of my daughter's life.
Excerpts in italics are from
the essay The Beginning Of Time, by Stephen W. Hawking
1.
The time scale of the universe is very long compared to that for
human life. It was therefore not surprising that until recently, the universe
was thought to be essentially static and unchanging in time.
The Longest Shortest Time is
the name of a podcast on parenting that I heard about several years before
becoming a parent and filed away mentally. “The days are long but the years are
short” is another phrase used to both comfort and cajole new parents. The
implication is that parenting shifts your experience of time, as if life simply
advancing in years wasn’t enough to do the same. One hour of an infant
screaming inconsolably after her two month immunization shots lasts longer than
her first eight-hour sleep stretch that comes later that night. All of the
mind-numbing hours of work in a cubicle in my former life suddenly feel like
vacation compared to trying to figure out a simple task like how to go to
Safeway and also to the Post Office.
2.
A pregnancy is marked by
trimesters and weeks, a newborn by days and weeks. But in some murky moment
between eight weeks and three months they go from being recorded in weeks to
months. After a year of age you may get credit for a half-year – as in, she’s three
and a half—but you are no longer allowed to claim this after some fuzzy time
between fifteen and eighteen. At nearly four months, I can no longer do the
math to translate Beatrix’s life from months to weeks; there is only forward.
Tomorrow marks her implant-aversary: the day her six-day-old embryonic self
came to reside in me. The day essentially that made me a mother.
3.
In an infinite and everlasting universe, every line of sight would
end on the surface of a star.
Six hours of sleep is enough to
exist on, but not when it has been bifurcated into two-hour shifts over a
ten-hour span. “Day” and “Night” are meaningless, there is only awake and
asleep. Sleep is a temporary escape from the experience of time. The moment I
am yanked from sleep by an urgent cry, heart terrorized, I’m plunged back into
time. Newborn hours put you in touch with your animal self, with the very
elements you are made of. The lived experience of them feels infinite. I email
a night doula at 3am to ask after her rates. She doesn’t reply for two days,
with an astronomical sum. Suddenly my overnights have a price attached. I am
thrilled she understands they are so costly.
4.
Beatrix’s late afternoon nap,
the last chance to get a sufficient number of hours of rest before day’s end, remains
a riddle to be solved. For three of her four months, true rest during this nap
is only achieved while being held. I position myself on the couch, a blanket
over my legs to ward off the apartment chill, the semi-round Boppi pillow
wrapping her close to me, a bedtime fan app singing out hypnotizing white
noise. Held this way, she can sleep two, three hours. In her crib she never
makes it past thirty minutes, and wakes angry. I have my phone and a book
nearby but ignore them. Instead I have grown to love not doing anything at all
during this nap. Thoughts meander at a pace reserved for being in bed with the
flu: random firing of neurons at once beautiful and undemanding. Nothing can be
accomplished. I know I have to give it up, have to teach her how to sleep well
in the afternoon on her own, but I dread the lines that would created on my
to-do list. I’m not ready to let go of unhurried time in bedroom fan silence.
5.
Galaxies move steadily apart from each other… one can plot the
separation of two galaxies as a function of time.
In the middle of a crisis,
time slows to concede to the depth of the disruption. I am nineteen when I
learn this. The hallways of the hospital are etched in my soul. My mother was
caught in a torrent of hallucinations for days following the surgery to embed a
Baclofen pump into her belly in an attempt to slow the progress of her chronic
progressive multiple sclerosis. Her fever dreams are of Murphy Brown and also
toxic air cranking through the recovery room vents. During the daily
forty-minute drive to the hospital I am uncomfortable listening to the Top 40
station. The music is too frivolous for this new heaviness. There is dread in
the drive there, lostness in the visit, guilt-ridden relief in the drive away.
I visit every day between college classes for the many weeks she spends not
really recovering. Those hours have left rings inside me like an old oak tree,
representing a great fire. I couldn’t then know her suffering would last two
more years. I couldn’t know then there’d be darker rings to come. And then,
finally, years after her death, signs of regrowth.
6.
“It goes by so fast,” is
another phrase used to traumatize new mothers into “cherishing every moment.”
But highlighting the scarcity of time only introduces anxiety. Like the very hungry
caterpillar, anxiety eats all the time it comes across transforming it into
even greater anxiety. When Bea is only five weeks old I find myself ogling
other people’s children, hunting for signs that she will eventually transform
into something I can relate to. I tell a friend: “I know it’s supposed to go by
so fast, but this part isn’t going by fast enough,” but feel angst for willing
time to hurry. I text my brother: “I’m basically white-knuckling it here until
she learns how to smile.” “Yep, you’re pretty much just a vending machine to
her until then,” he texts back. “Hang in there.” He does not write it goes by so fast because he has three
children and knows intimately how deathly slow time can take to pass.
7.
Although on average, the galaxies are moving apart from each other
at a steady rate, they also have small additional velocities, relative to the
uniform expansion. These so-called “peculiar velocities” of the galaxies, may
be directed sideways to the main expansion.
The first time she sleeps
through the night I wake at 2am. Being able to wake up according to my own
sleep cycle and not from an urgent cry is disorienting, but heavenly. I feel
rested. I wait, listening. No need to let myself drift back into sleep, it’s
just a matter of time. I’m hungry. If I’m hungry shouldn’t she be famished? I
need to pee but our creaky floors are like trumpets blaring to her perfectly
undamaged hearing. It’s 5am and I realize I haven’t slept, but certainly she
will wake any moment, and it’s so painful to be ripped from blissful deep
sleep. And then it’s 6:10 and a cry pierces through the air, yanking me from a
incomprehensible dream and I feel a thousand times worse than I did at 2am.
8.
The first weeks of her life
have us recording every start time for feeding, every wet and dirty diaper. The
hospital gives us a small white booklet for this purpose. We take turns
entering the data in the dark hours overnight until we come to the end of the
booklet. We can’t bring ourselves to stop. I tear half sheets of paper for each
day’s numbers. When she gains back enough birth weight we are allowed to stop
considering the diapers, but I find I am lost in time if I don’t write down
when I start a feeding and with which breast. One day my husband orders us a
digital clock for the living room, so much easier to read than our lovely but
artfully indiscernible clock made of recycled record album. The next day I wake
up from a nap to find the label maker on the coffee table and the digital clock
bedecked: Beatrix Mission Control Official Time. It is the single most pure
object that demarcates our before and after lives. I still record every feed,
keeping track of right or left in a notes app on my phone so that I don’t have
to spend any mental effort remembering.
9.
…to understand the very high-density stage, when the universe was
very small, one needs a quantum theory of gravity, which will combine General
Relativity and the Uncertainty Principle.
The Fourth Trimester is not
something that can be recorded in weeks but is a very real lived experience.
Human animals must be born before they are ready, their skulls would otherwise
devastate their mothers. Other creatures exist without mothers, but we are
beyond vulnerable in our earliest days. To survive the Fourth Trimester with a
creature who would rather be back in the womb one must recreate the womb in as
many ways as possible: shushing sounds to fill the silence, close holds,
warmth, bounces or rocking. The Fourth Trimester is solely about survival; the
babe’s and yours. “There are no bad habits yet,” the experts tell me, “You just
have to get through.” The “yet” hangs there, threatening, implying that
eventually there will be demands beyond mere survival.
10.
Chocolate becomes essential
to survival. A one-pound box of See’s Candies, a treat normally reserved for
the annual celebrating of birthdays, becomes a weekly staple for six weeks
straight. “There are no bad habits,” we tell each other. “It’s all about survival,”
we say, popping yet another milk or dark chocolate truffle in our faces. “Dark
chocolate has iron,” I declare, my uterus still bleeding into wholeness. A
small fortune in chocolate, worth every debit charge. It sweetens the memory of
those first sleepless weeks.
11.
Quantum theory introduces a new idea, that of imaginary time…One
can picture it the following way. One can think of ordinary, real, time as a
horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future.
But there’s another kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called
imaginary time, because it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But
in a sense, it is just as real, as what we call real time.
When she is three weeks old I
can barely manage to imagine life at four weeks, the horizon is too immediate.
At two months old I research furiously when she might begin to sleep through
the night and find a horizon worth dreaming about at four months old. She is
now four months old and I find I have a wide swath of horizon, have gotten just
enough rest to look into the future without driving impatience. The gift of
being forty-three and a mother for the first time is how deep and wide my
experience of challenge fortifies me. If it weren’t for my living with the
experience of my mother dying, I’m not sure I would have survived these initial
months. The knowledge that comes from the rings of strife born out of living
with her years of dying is now an enormous strength that helps me live each
day.
12.
You can’t really explain your
experience of time to someone else, and maybe you can never fully understand it
yourself. You can’t take yourself out of time and study yourself like a
scientist. You can’t have perfect understanding of the before and after, or even
of the during. But each delicate moment of life with a new life contains a
multitude, a mystery, a magnificence.
Wonderful.
ReplyDelete