Time

It is yesterday. I am thinking about all of the blog posts I have wanted to write over the last month. About how I have meant to but in the end I don't have the time to.

It is right now. I am thinking about how much less time it would take to write this post if I had both hands to type with. But I only have my right hand, as there is a little girl being rocked in my left.

It is November 2004. I am sitting in my father's Lutheran Doctrine class at the Lutheran Student Center. I am there because I want to be, but also so that I can be his ride when he's too weak to drive himself. He is teaching about chronos time and chiros time. I still think about this - God's time and our time - quite a lot. There is no brilliant realization associated to these many thoughts, perhaps someday there will be. For now, they are just that - thoughts.

It is today. I am still trying to learn that time is different now than before Adah. I think about all that I used to get done in a Sunday. All of the stuff. And how my to-do lists have changed, heck, if I even find the time to make a to-do list. I now try to set just one goal per day. Today's goal: use the push mower (very excited about this - mowing without gas) to mow the lawn while Adah naps. This is a great plan, as it should really only take about 1/2 hour, but Adah seems to have decided that she does not want to nap today. However, I am still just as stubborn as I was before I had a child. So, it is 5 p.m., Adah is wide awake, and I am mowing the lawn using the push mower while she sits close to me, smiling, in the moby wrap. I just wanted the time to mow. I am still not very flexible.

It is March. I am six months pregnant and walking to class at the university with my friend, colleague and former dance therapy supervisor. She tells me that her sense of time changed when she had children and has never changed back. I did not believe her then, but oh how I believe her now.

I am finding myself consumed with and overwhelmed by this thing called time.

Timelines. We have lived in this house for three weeks now. Many projects have been finished, many are still in process. We (I) get much less accomplished each day then expected. My husband is working like mad, and I love him for working so hard to make this house into a home. But still, in spite of my sincere gratitude and deepest breaths and best intentions, I am impatient. Each project takes much longer than anticipated. I do not have a kitchen sink, countertops, or a shower at the moment. I am truly trying to be patient but am absolutely miserable at it. We go to the gym each day mostly so that I can take a shower, but as I workout I somehow always manage to get sucked into some absolutely terrible baby reality show on TLC or some house renovation show on HGTV. I cry as I workout. Yes, I am that lady. But the pathetic poor quality television shows makes me feel not alone, not crazy. I keep reminding myself that this is a season, and that we should all hold loosely to timelines in order to avoid disappointment. And it's really not so bad, after all. The gym showers are quite nice.

Time out. No one could have made me understand how absolutely responsible I feel for Adah 100% of the time. I long for a break from feeling so responsible, and yet when I am not with her, I am missing her like crazy. I came to realize, very early on, that there is not really such thing as a time out for a mother. I also realize (horrified) that this last statement makes me sound like my own mother, except that this is really not a complaint, just a statement. I can't really imagine wanting to take a break from loving the best little person in the whole wide world, exhausting as it might be.

Time off. I am nearing the end of my maternity leave summer, preparing to go back now in a matter of weeks. I feel beyond measure blessed that I can do what I love part-time, that Paul has a flexible schedule, and as a result of these two things, that Adah will not be in daycare. It is truly the best situation I could hope for. But I am nervous. As I scurry to arrange schedules and details my head swarms with fears...how will I manage working when I feel I can hardly manage everything I want and need to be doing as a mother when I'm home full-time? How can I fully be invested in my work while being equally invested in the well being of my daughter? How do couples manage the sacrifice of less time together so that they can both work and minimize child care? How do I relish the time I have at both work and at home without feeling like I am neglecting another part of my life when I doing one? How do I free myself from all of these anxious questions so that I can just enjoy the time I have right now and love the work I do (which I do) once I have the chance to go back to it?

Time flies. I unpacked Adah's room last week, and in the process repacked clothes she has already grown out of. I mourned a little bit to pack those five newborn onesies that were the only thing that fit her for weeks, and those little tiny mitts that kept her from scratching her face. I look at her in her carseat and can't believe how much bigger she is already, and marvel at the fact that she is more responsive and alert each day, and that she has already changed so significantly in her three short months of life. I think about a card someone gave us at a shower - it read "the days are long and the years are short." I tend to think that the days are also short, but regardless, can't believe the changes happening before my eyes. And most days, I still find myself thinking to myself.."We are raising a person. Holy crap."

Time warp. We just got back from a trip to Nebraska, the prairie land we call home. The visits home are always filled with some strange time warp feelings, finding myself flooded with memories and trying my hardest to stay conscious so as to not regress to old, deliberately changed parts of myself. This strange sense of living in some sort of time bubble colored this entire trip back...

It is Saturday morning. We have just arrived last night, after a long drive with too much Iowa. I have decided to take a run around the old neighborhood. I do this often when home for a visit, but this time is different. I am deliberate in my route. I run to my elementary school, noting the homes of former classmates along the way and wondering what they are doing now, as ghosts of pre-teens gallivanting around to and from each other's neighborhood homes on banana seat bicycles cloud my thinking. I notice the little building that used to be the library, before the fancy new building took over, and remember picking out book after book to read throughout the summer from the low-ceilinged, musty little space. I remember my siblings and the swimming pool and the Mickey Mouse Club on hot summer afternoons. I think about an elementary school self. The run is much too short for all of the memories.

It is Saturday still, only a few hours after the run, and I am with my husband and daughter on the way to a high school tour - the first of a day of high school reunion festivities. It is very funny for me to share this moment with my husband, both of us laughing about how we never would have dreamed we'd be married, let alone have a child, ten years earlier. The halls of the high school reek of memories, and images of a younger self race through my mind throughout the day. I am overwhelmed to see so many old friends and peers in one place, and pleasantly surprised at how adult and mature and sophisticated everyone (for the most part...) seems. I think about all of the life I have lived in the past ten years since I last walked through the same hallways. And yet it all seems close and strangely tangible.

It is Sunday morning, and I am hugging my sister as we stand outside of our childhood home together for the last time. We are crying. It is not a very good day.

It is Thursday morning. We are still in Lincoln. Adah has been cuddled and cooed at by a barrage of people who are so very dear to us, who we hope she will grow to not only know but also love. I am absolutely emotionally exhausted.

It is Thursday afternoon. I have been sorting through my old bedroom for hours now. The yellow walls feel like they are caving in on me, in so many different senses. I am sorting out twenty-five years of life, glimpsing at myself over the years bit by bit, through old prom pictures and beat up pointe shoes and journals and notebooks full of to-do lists (some things are slow to change). I throw away an incredible amount of old schoolwork that I was just sure I would need and use again. The donation pile grows into a large heap as I try to allow my logical senses to be stronger than my sentimental ones. I try not to let myself get sidetracked, but it is very difficult to not stop to read the words scrawled onto notebook pages, telling tales of naive dreams and first loves and broken hearts and overwhelming illness. I am full.

It is Friday morning. I can no longer avoid this moment. I walk out to my father's old wood shop for a good cry. It is a strange time warp indeed, the same sawdust he blew still coating every inch of the space. I see the rotary phone he couldn't bear to waste that he brought out to the shed when we upgraded to a touch-tone phone for the house. There is a list on the woodbench, coated in sawdust and wood stain and written on the reverse side of a renewal notice for Woodsmith Magazine. It reads the name of each of my father's staff members from a certain year, and next to each name the gift they will receive - quilt rack, plant stand etc. etc. etc. I think about all of the unfinished wood projects, and I must leave. I go to get Adah, and so that we can take a picture by the oak tree we planted for Dad when he died. I do not take this moment to tell her about her Grandfather, taking the picture is all I can handle. I can tell her the stories later. She won't remember this picture, this moment anyhow. I walk around inside and outside of the house until I can't handle it any longer, and then I tell my husband we must go, get this good-bye over with so that I don't have to dread it further. And then we drive away from the only childhood home I'll ever know, for one last time.

Often when I am seeing clients, I am reminding them to "live in the present." I am so strongly aware of the irony that charging them to experience life in the present brings, when I am constantly challenged by this very notion in my own life. How can we possibly separate ourselves from the past, from the time in this world that has shaped who we are and all that we know and how we see the world? And moreover, how can we possibly allow that past - that which has made us who we are in the present - to be a part of our story without plaguing us or holding us hostage? Theories abound, and many people claim to have found their own way to living joyfully in the present, and if you are one of those people - more power to you. But if you are like me, today, you are honest in admitting that no matter how hard and long you try, you can't quite figure it out. You, as well, are confined by these limits of time.