This Time Like Lightening

This day has crept up on me without warning. No slow build, no anticipation. I looked at my watch and realized we’re the 14th. Another month has turned. My tiny baby who, in the calendar of my mind is still a floppy mewing thing, is now ten months old.

Time glides along, then skims, then skates, and then gushes and leaks, and we can’t hold it in while also chasing deadlines, making dinner, and meeting the school bus. 

My first baby’s infancy passed at a trickle’s pace. The second was quicker, but still with undisturbed stretches of waveless time. But this is some sort of lighting that I can’t hold onto. I haven’t kept up with her monthly updates. I’ve not managed even a picture a day, not even in my mind. Some days I close my day with just the barest moments of connection: ten seconds of locked eyes and time slows, but then it’s off to stop a fight or worry about dinner or meet someone else’s need.

Even now, I want to stop here, linger over these words, revisit them with a fresh mind. But there’s not a way to march backwards and then come again at this day with a mindfulness I don’t have today. So, I’ll post this. And rush through this day, and this evening. And maybe I’ll get up early tomorrow and meditate. Maybe I’ll slow things down. Or maybe I’ll accept the pace this season demands. Or maybe, most likely, I won’t do any of those things. I’ll chase time, at the behest of modern late-stage capitalism, I’ll build my tiny empire, I’ll put on lipstick and take my kids to school, and run to the grocery store and make dinner. But in a tiny corner of my mind, there’s knowing that this isn’t the way. There’s resisitence.