I've been thinking about what to write, when to write, how to write for a long time now. For months, I have had no idea what to say or how I want to say it, so I've taken a page out of the Book of Impulse and decided to just start writing.
I'm a mom. What the fuck.
It feels like being trapped in a temporal anomaly. Everything is new, everything is different, but it feels like he's always been here, as if there never existed a time pre-baby. Or rather, that the pre-baby existence was someone else's life.
I've never had a problem with mortality. It has never concerned me greatly, that my life was ticking away or that I would grow old and die. I was playing with little Squidge on my lap today with a toy mirror. The mirror is kid friendly, of course, so it bends creating this bizarro distorted reflection almost constantly because he almost constantly has one of his hands bending it up to his mouth. I was smiling and caught my reflection in a rare un-bendy moment. I had laugh lines. Wrinkles. "I look like I'm 30", I thought in astonishment. Before I realized I almost am 30.
I don't begrudge my face my laugh lines, or my eyes my wrinkles. In the same way I don't begrudge my body the stretch marks from pregnancy. They're my tiger stripes. I earned each one of those stretch marks. I fought the demons of biology for them, screaming, literally for hours, so I'll be damned if I'll feel bad about them. I've earned every wrinkles on my face from every joke, every sorrow, every experience that's formed them and formed me along the way. But I what I hadn't realized, until I caught my fun-house reflection in the bizarro mirror, was that I had already had so many experiences.
Considering the exponentially growing life expectancy, it's reasonable to say that I'm a good third of the way through my life. How did that happen? Where did the time go? I spent my miserable early teen years yearning for life to get on with itself so that I could start living. And suddenly I was here, married, with a child, in a house no bigger than a breadbox, expected to be a mother. Where on earth did all the time go?
Little Squidge rolled over on his own. His first act in his journey towards locomotion. There must be some science fiction explanation for the bending of time that causes it to move so slowly when you are young, but speed up as you get older. If Squidge could be aware of time (instead of only aware of his own fingers) the past 5 months would seem an eternity. It's all he's known, and it's taken him so long to get to a point where he can awkwardly flop his body over like a near-dead fish. But for me it's gone so fast. One minute he was this squawking, bloody mess being handed to me, the next he was rolling over and grinning up at me in triumph.
Where did all the time go?
