As I write this, my baby is sleeping on me, head on my chest, legs frogged across my lap, arms draped downwards like a sloth on a branch. She’s almost five months old now, but the way time moves with a baby, it feels impossible and maybe beside the point to measure.
Since June, we’ve both transformed over and over. The change is physical. For myself, I can track time through the healing of the incision across my belly, the weaving of scar tissue, the mobility of my spine measured in physical therapy sessions with a tool called a goniometer. I can track it also through my daughter’s growth, her weight doubling, her hair falling out and leaving a friar’s crown around the back of her head, her body learning to uncurl now that it’s no longer restricted by mine. Even more amazing are the changes in her cognitive development, which must be happening gradually all the time but present themselves suddenly. Suddenly she’s looking at our faces more often than at the shadows on the wall, suddenly she’s smiling, then laughing, suddenly she’s combining her baby sounds into baby sentences, speaking enthusiastically in a language I wish I could understand and sometimes think maybe I do.
The change is spiritual too. I was an ambivalent pregnant person—not because I didn’t want a baby but because I felt overtaken by pregnancy. It demanded everything: my energy, my mobility, my skin, the rest of my organs crushed by my uterus, my appearance, my pride, my mind. It demanded that I risk my life, and it seemed also to demand that I become someone else entirely. I couldn’t imagine motherhood on personal terms. I could only see it as a cliche, as a force that would erase my distinguishing characteristics and leave me unrecognizable. Under the weight of all of this, I felt angry and depressed, and I worried that I would be an angry and depressed mother as well.
Instead, I saw my daughter for the first time, and she looked so familiar. In her fierce expression, newly born but 41 weeks in development, I saw my mother. In all the times I had imagined my baby’s face, I hadn’t conceived of this one, but it felt exactly right. She was undeniably mine, and nothing about her felt general, threatening, or unwelcome. All my fears about motherhood dissolved in that instant, leaving space, I’m sure, for others I’ll spend a lifetime discovering. In my immense psychological luck, I felt ready to be her mother. I’d never felt such an immediate shift in mindset before, and amid all the syncopated routines of the hospital and a newborn baby, not to mention the dim, permanent-dusk light of our recovery room, time slowed to a degree that seemed almost supernatural. Those three post-birth nights in the hospital, our initiation into being a family, felt beyond the measure of time.
In this tender state of mind, after the trauma of pregnancy and birth and the ecstasy of becoming a parent, I felt close to enlightenment. All my many hangups felt like unnecessary bullshit keeping me from connecting on a deeper level with the people I love. As a family, we spent days lying around the house, my husband playing piano, me knitting, our baby napping in a nest on the couch. I felt I needed nothing else. (Morbidly, these scenes also felt so idyllic that it seemed death had to be imminent, and I thought if that was the case, I might not even mind.) My bullshit does come back, though, reliably as the tide. So, by this spiritual measure, time is cyclical.
In one day with a baby, time moves at multiple speeds. Carried by her needs and ours, morning can slip into afternoon without notice. Her needs are few, insistent, repetitive, draining, and also joyful. They keep us almost always in some degree of exhaustion, which affects the way time passes too. Sometimes the best I can do is to lie beside her and watch her play. Sometimes she’s resisting sleep and I just want to be on the other side of it already and asleep in bed myself. But even in those moments I’m aware of the brevity of babyhood and how much I like her as a baby, how little I want to rush this stage.
The sweet moments are heightened by this reality too. When she laughs and laughs at the same bit—raspberries, fart noises, jiggling on my knees. When I bring my face close to hers and she smiles shyly and goes, “ooh.” When she sleeps in my arms, as she still is right now, her cheeks puffed and facing up, looking like a cub, a pup, a reminder of what humans are, animals living in time. These moments, like the difficult ones, end, and because babies change so quickly, I don’t know which might be ending for good. Already so much has disappeared: her newborn top-of-the-head smell, the reflexive way she flung her hands out when startled, her perpetually curled-up fists, packed full of lint.
Often the future seems layered over the present. When we walk at the high school track nearby or see kids of different ages at the farmers’ market with their parents, I imagine my daughter at every age. When my mother wonders aloud how she’ll be as a teenager, I wonder how my parents will be then, if they will be here. I imagine my daughter reading my words and feel these separate points in time touching. I remind myself that the future isn’t here now, and none of it is predestined.
It helps that everywhere are reminders of the bodily present: the trash can with this many days of dirty diapers, the drying rack with this many hours of clean bottles. Babies come with powerful routines—bedtime, story time, tummy time, walk time, bath time—and with them so many opportunities for daily tenderness. I brush my daughter’s fine hair with a soft brush, clean her neck creases with a wet washcloth and pat them with a dry one, trim her nails, rock her in the dark with her warm head against my cheek, always trying to be deserving of the trust she gives me without question. The moment stretches mercifully. The moment is already gone.