sursly

Time has always been a tricky concept for me and since having a child instantly puts you in an alternate-time-universe I still haven’t “figured it out.” It used to be that everything sucky lasted forever and everything great just flew by. Awesome, right? Kind of. For the most part I could count own those two rules. But something happened to us beginning in August of 2005 (ripple dissolve).

There is nothing more appropriate for this epic shift in your sense of time than counting down the months/weeks/days to your child’s birth, which is both a) an impossible thing to predict (“due date”, seriously?) and b) the first day in which time will no longer continue to make sense to you. Assuming that your child was born on his/her due date (which they weren’t) you’ll never be able to prepare for this switch. Well I wasn’t.

Example
Today’s date: June 12, 2007 (happy birthday Kelly!)
Jonah’s age: 22 months
Feel like I’ve been a parent for: a little while.
That period before I was a parent: feels like half a life-time ago.

22 months is not a long time. But, it feels like it has lasted an eternity. And, it has flown by. India (only three years ago) seems more like a dream than a memory. So does college. But so does that time when Jonah just drooled and slept all day and stared into oblivion (the glory days). The contradictions are endless and I’ve made no progress in understanding how to possibly prepare for the next onslaught of timewarp. But there were a few obvious contributing factors in this whole mess.

Jonah’s birth was sort of the beginning of the end for sleep. While he was napping between 14-17 hours a day during his first few weeks on Earth the few of those remaining hours he was awake were between 1-8am. But oh, its fun because you have a new baby, and he’s cute, and you’re losing your mind because you’ve been rocking a kid to sleep for 30 minutes and the sun is coming up, but it’s okay because he “cooed.” You get through it, but this inevitably defines the first stages of “Parent Time.”

Which is different from, you know, time. Going somewhere? 25 minutes late. Anywhere. We could plan a week in advance, or leave early to get wherever it is we were going with a newborn. Late. It isn’t as though Megan and I were that casual before Jonah. The “fashionably late” doctor appointment becomes uncool after 10 minutes, we learned. And missing not only the previews (sorry Meg) but the first 10 minutes of a movie you kind of wanted to see but really just wanted to get out of the house? Also uncool.

So we got used to sleeping no more than five hours a night and being late all the time. This would have been somewhat tolerable if it lasted a few days, or maybe (maybe!) a few weeks. But eight months go by and you’ve actually gone insane. Strange how that happens. Your sweet, beautiful child is crying at 3am and that’s it. Can’t go another night. “We’re letting him cry it out tomorrow,” we say. But we don’t. But then, we DO. And then (!) a few days later, he’s sleeping all night. And those previous eight months of torture kind of melt away, and our faces slowly begin to resemble 20 somethings again. And we’re happy. And so is the baby.

Then, things really start to move. He’s eating solid food, and you can barely remember the time when he was just eating mush. And he’s walking, which is great, but he’ll surely kill himself in the process, and you crave a time when he sat in the bouncer all day (which, again, seems like it lasted ages but was only a few months ago).

But this doesn’t stop happening. There is always a milestone, always something your child is doing or learning that changes everything in your life, and you think “remember when ____” and realize that you may never experience that again. But you can’t dwell on this because look, he’s 22 months old, can speak full sentences, and will possibly remember getting a splinter today. Or making home-made Play Dough with his Mom. Or strumming the guitar with his Dad. And you can’t explain it, but it’s comforting, in an uncomfortable way.

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