How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Time

Fifteen years ago, I became a mother and lost track of time. The organizing principle of my life with my infant son was purely physical: milk in, milk out. I was a manager of bodily fluids. As I shuffled from room to room in our small San Francisco apartment, changing diapers and nursing pads, chasing down rags to catch the copious results of my son’s reflux, I caught myself muttering about “precious bodily fluids,” like the crazy guy in Dr. Strangelove. That guy didn’t seem so crazy anymore. 

On the night of my son’s bris—after the cutting and the commotion and the drops of wine the mohel administered to soothe the pain—he never fell asleep. My husband, Adam, and I took turns walking the hardwood floors of our apartment with him in our arms all night, the lower half of my body still throbbing from childbirth. When I cried, I wasn’t sure if my tears were from exhaustion, guilt, or the pain of knowing that I was not up to the task of motherhood. My son had only been in this world for eight days. But after that night, I became obsessed with teaching him the difference between day and night. 

I was an associate attorney at a law firm, where I measured my day in billable increments of 18 minutes. Calendars and schedules were my foundation. I believed that I could harness them to regain the sense of control that I’d lost when giving birth turned me inside out. Motherhood unmoored me; I clung to the clock like a life raft.

Three months after my son was born, we moved to Austin. As he got old enough to walk, dress himself, and get distracted by a million little things on our way out the door in the mornings, I was always rushing him toward some temporal goal: bedtime; or a doctor’s appointment; or the rush to leave the house in the morning because lingering for too long at the breakfast table had ended in tears before—mine, his, or both—and was likely to do so again. None of it felt good or natural. But I believed that I was doing my duty. I was indoctrinating a new human in the dogma of time, substituting an artificial set of motivations for his innate ability to be in his body in the moment. I was a drill sergeant barking orders, a grim mask of determination hiding my real face.

It was different when my daughter came along. After three years of motherhood, and with an established family routine, I could afford to be more patient with her deliberate pace. When she was little, I didn’t rush her like I had rushed my son; I delighted in her meandering, felt curious about the little things that grabbed her attention on our way out the door.

Still, once I had two kids in school, the drill sergeant returned. We wake because it’s time. We eat because it’s time. We sleep because it’s time. We have to leave—now!—because it’s time. 

In 2016, Adam opened a restaurant. In the beginning, he worked every night, leaving me responsible for childcare on evenings and weekends. During the week, an alarm on my phone rang at 5:00 p.m., reminding me to leave the office immediately or risk additional charges at the afterschool program and two grumpy children. Weekends were filled with soccer practice, birthday parties, and religious school. The long, undifferentiated hours with my infant son looked like paradise in comparison to this. I had to-do lists for home and for work. I never reached the bottom of anything except a wine glass. On the nights when I drank too much wine, I woke up at 3:00 a.m. like proverbial clockwork, anxiety and sugar coursing through my body as insistently as the pain in my son’s body on the night of his bris, or so I imagine. Awake on those nights, I thought about the girl I’d been before motherhood—the girl who’d backpacked through Europe in college. I was 40 years old. I couldn’t imagine feeling that free and independent again.

My children attended a public school with a Vietnamese dual-language program. In the restaurant’s second year, the school announced an opportunity to go to Vietnam for three weeks over winter break. Suddenly, I had never wanted anything as badly as I wanted to take my children to Vietnam. 

Adam couldn’t abandon his restaurant over the holidays. He was not happy about us leaving him at home alone. I pleaded: “We might never have this opportunity again!” I hated to hurt him, but I’d been hurting since the restaurant opened, and this trip felt like exactly what I needed. Adam drove us to the airport and left us with big hugs for everyone and a sad look especially for me. I wondered if I was ruining my marriage. Twenty-three hours later, the kids and I landed in Hanoi.

We barely had enough time to unpack before our tour guides ushered us onto a bus. The strategy seemed to be to outrun jet lag. I didn’t mind; after so many months trapped in the Bermuda triangle of home, work, and school, I couldn’t get enough of seeing new things. My children, who were nine and six, had been excited about the trip. But now that we were in Vietnam, my son became anxious when we moved from one place to another. Even after I assured him that our group would not leave without us, he kept asking me what time it was and trying to rush us through meals and sightseeing in order to keep up. He’d never been like this before. His panic surprised me. I thought about when he was small, how I was always rushing him. Was he afraid that I would leave him behind?

On our third or fourth day of travel, our tour bus stopped at the top of a mountain between Hanoi and Sapa. The cool air smelled like pineapple. Steep hills spread out beneath us, terraced with crops all the way down. While my phone-obsessed daughter posed for pictures with other people from our group, my son and I stood at a distance, looking down over the fence at the view. I reached over to give him a side hug, and he looked back at me with a quizzical expression. 

“Why are you like this?” he asked. 

I raised my eyebrow and asked what he meant. 

“I mean, why are you so. . . different. You seem, I don’t know, lighter.”

I stumbled out an answer: “just happy to be here with you, sweetheart.” But his question unnerved me. I felt my face muscles, relaxed. I didn’t have the mask of maternal persistence. Then I realized why my son was confused. He only knew me as a mom in a hurry. He had never seen me as a girl on a mountain, with nowhere else to be except by his side.

Not long after our trip to Vietnam, I stopped working on Fridays. It was a financial sacrifice, but reducing my hours wasn’t hard to justify. I was the only Jewish attorney at the nonprofit where I worked. Some of my colleagues assumed I needed time to prepare for Shabbat, and I didn’t correct them. When I told my friends, they praised me: “You’re so good at carving out time.” They meant well. But the suggestion that I could carve time like a pie made me bristle. I preferred to say that I’d bought the time. Sometimes I added an F-bomb for emphasis: I fucking bought it. I wanted people to see the cost. 

If I’d stuck with economics rather than magical thinking, maybe my Fridays would have been enough. But that’s not what happened. Somehow, I convinced myself that subtracting eight hours from my work week meant unlimited time to take on new activities. On Friday mornings, I caught up on housework and administrative tasks. That left a scant couple of hours in the afternoon to cram in volunteering, writing, coffee dates, and other activities I scheduled for myself. Then it was time to pick up the kids. My to-do lists got longer, and I still never reached the end. I felt like Hermione Granger with her magic time-turner in my son’s Harry Potter books. I’d tried to conquer time without rationing my ambition, and now I was exhausted.

I felt despair and a vague sense of guilt. I knew the rhetoric in my brain was unfeminist, but I felt guilty for stealing income from my family. I felt selfish, even though I was still making challah and Shabbat dinner from scratch every Friday. While the challah baked and my kids watched the TV show that (sometimes) prevented them from lashing out at each other in hanger, I set out candles to say blessings, drank wine, and stress-scrolled through my social media feeds, seething with resentment. Working fewer hours helped, but it didn’t solve my underlying grudge match with time. 

Then came 2020. The pandemic arrived in my life gradually and then all at once, with a time-warping effect that underlined the surreal quality of its spread about the world. I read a few articles about cases in China, then news of cases in Texas began to trickle in, and suddenly it was March 11, 2020. Adam and I were reading in bed when his phone buzzed on the nightstand. 

“Wow,” he said. “The NBA just canceled basketball.” 

I stared across the pillows at him, trying to read the back of his neck for some sign of what this might mean for the restaurant and our family. It felt like no time passed between that night and the morning a few days later when he stood by our front door, dressed and ready to go to work, his eyes brimming with tears as he told me that he had called a meeting to lay off all of his employees. 

The shutdown hit my son, in fifth grade, particularly hard. With no reason to leave the house, he stopped waking up. It was difficult to get him out of bed for virtual school, but we managed. Weekends were harder. When he failed to get out of bed by 12:00 p.m., I became enraged with a primal fury that I could barely control. I could not bear the sight of my beautiful, healthy boy lying in bed in full daylight. I imagined his growing limbs atrophying from inactivity, mildew spreading across his pillowcase. I screamed at him, pulled at his legs, splashed water in his face, threatened to take away beloved LEGO projects that had taken him days to finish if he didn’t get the fuck out of bed right now. My son was unmoved. He was clearly not sleeping—not after my demonstrative objections. But he refused to get up until he was good and ready. 

In hindsight, my child, like so many children during the pandemic, was showing symptoms of depression. I wish that I had seen the situation more clearly. But at the time, I was reeling. I failed to appreciate the impact on my 11-year-old son of abruptly losing the only routine he’d ever known—waking up and leaving the house. I was the one who’d taught him to prioritize that routine over the rhythms of his own body. When he wouldn’t get out of bed, I interpreted his behavior as a rejection of me. 

I would love to write that my desperation led me to investigate my relationship to time. In later years, I would reconsider how I used alcohol to shrink the long, frustrating hours after work and before bed. I would see how I’d tried and failed to outsmart time with my crafty scheduling. In 2020, I wasn’t that intentional about it. What happened is this: I had to leave the house because I didn’t want to kill my son, so I went outside to walk.

It was a glorious spring. The bluebonnets were especially abundant, as if some higher power knew that we needed an extra dose to get through the long days of lockdown. I took long, meandering walks, unmasked and grateful for our wide suburban streets. At first, I listened to podcasts. Then I started leaving my phone behind, intentionally listened to the birds, squirrels, and rustling of leaves. I walked every day until I’d memorized all the foliage on my route. Then, one morning in May, I turned a corner and gasped, my breath taken away by a field of yellow wildflowers that had sprung up overnight. Time slowed down, and the sky looked different, softer than it had before. It felt like when I was younger, back when I was developing a taste for a larger world. Only this time, the world was coming into focus.

Spring boiled over into summer and the pandemic continued its path of destruction through all of my son’s favorite things—swimming pools closed, blockbuster movies delayed, the three weeks of sleepaway camp that he cherished canceled despite my increasingly frazzled assurances: “there is no way they are going to cancel camp.” I woke up earlier to walk in the mornings, keeping track of which Esperanza bushes had erupted in yellow blooms and which were waiting to exult. And then it was fall. One blustery October day, moments before a rainstorm, I saw so many monarchs surfing the air currents that I couldn’t tell the difference between the butterflies and the yellow-orange oak leaves swirling all around me. 

As the temperature dropped, I became more attuned to man-made seasons. In November, a proliferation of reindeer, Santas and colorful lights made my house look conspicuously dark. In February of 2021 came Residential Bulk Collection Week, a biannual ritual in which everyone piles unwanted stuff on the curb to be picked up by city sanitation workers. There were the usual car seats, highchairs, and broken baby pools, opportunities for nostalgia on every block. There was also a surprising number of toilets. It was like all the potties in the neighborhood had quit in unison, simply overwhelmed at the volume now that people had only one place to poop. 

One morning, Adam called me to the window with excitement in his voice. There was more snow in our backyard than I’d ever seen in Texas. It was fun at first. But it didn’t melt, and then the pipes froze, the energy grid failed, and my brain throbbed, once again, with the sensation that I was living through a surrealist performance piece about late-stage capitalism. We were lucky to live near an essential facility, so we didn’t lose power, but we obeyed the call to conserve energy, which meant letting the kids sleep as late as they wanted to. I made peace with this. My office, to which no one had been going anyway, announced that all work was suspended. Adam sat on the couch in his bathrobe all day with an iPad, iPhone, and laptop, air-traffic-controlling a fleet of restaurant workers delivering meals around the city. There was nothing for me to do but take care of my family and walk. Time meant nothing, again. 

The city couldn’t send any trucks out during the freeze, so all the old mattresses, moldy couches, and cribs left on the curb became buried under a thick blanket of snow, forming large, oddly shaped boulders. When I walked in the afternoon, my son sometimes joined me. Our destination was the one steep hill in our neighborhood. On our way we made a game of trying to identify all the junk that lay under the snow. At first, people went crazy with the snow; the hill was crowded with people on sleds and skis that looked brand new. A week later, the snow was sparse and dirty, but this didn’t stop determined sledders from making do with plastic inner tubes, trash can lids, and other detritus from the curb. One day my son and I stood at the top of the hill, looking across the field at a group of teenage boys who were sledding unusually far and fast on flat white ovals. 

“Oh my god,” I said. “Those are toilet seats.”

This time, my son did not ask why I looked different or lighter. We stood there and watched until our faces froze. 

I’m not going to stop having deadlines and meeting times and getting frustrated with my children when they don’t get up for school or come to the table while the food is hot. But these things seem less fraught when I try to see time differently—when I try not to fear the drumbeat of the clock ordering me to be somewhere or someone I’m not, but simply to look time in the face. I am collecting ways to measure the passage of time that celebrate our bodily existence, like the scribbles on our laundry room wall where we’ve drawn lines with Sharpies above our children’s heads every year that we’ve lived in the same house. Those markings are nothing like the symmetry of a clock. I love how they climb the wall in different colors and irregular intervals. The last time we measured my son, his mark was a hair above mine. 

I recently started wearing an old Swatch that my son relinquished when he got his first iPhone. When I hear its rhythmic ticking, I remind myself that no matter how I try, I can’t beat time. Whenever I look down at my wrist, I think about standing next to my son at the top of a hill. I think about how our lives only overlap in this one span of time between the moment when he took his first breath and the moment when one of us stops breathing. I remember that I have to love him now because it’s time.

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