Growing up, my middle school let out at 2:30pm. Days of Our Lives started at 3pm. Every weekday afternoon, my sister and I arrived home with just enough time to turn the oven on and cook ourselves the cuisine of American 90s kids everywhere: jalapeño poppers, mozzarella sticks, pizza bagels. And Hot Pockets. So many Hot Pockets. Somehow always molten at the edges and arctic at the center. Physics be damned.
Mere inches from the TV, fingers dripping with grease, we watched as Sami Brady sat on death row for a murder she didn’t commit. Her redemption took the show many months to deliver. That was the trick of those afternoons, the con of youth: time was something we had so much of that we couldn’t even feel it passing. It sifted — one grain, one episode, one jalapeño popper at a time — and it never once occurred to me that this was a luxury. Now the same universe that poured a few grains at a time seems to be dumping the whole hourglass.
Today my boy started kindergarten.
In some ways, the exhaustion of his first few months still haunts me— his eyes open at some ungodly hour, mine open right along with them, both of us staring across the room like Alex DeLarge. Me wishing away minutes with him, for mercy, for reprieve.
In other ways, I am in complete denial that he was ever little at all. When I see babies out in the wild, bouncing in their strollers, I doubt ours was ever that tiny. Surely he arrived mostly formed, already talking, already partial to Tom Petty, Hot Wheels, and artichokes.
Although — there’s video. There he is, immobile as a honey-baked ham, arms windmilling until we translated the flail into milk, into a nap, into a new diaper. Five years, an eyeblink, and now the questions: does it hurt to have a baby because the baby’s bigger than where it comes out? Are kids mean because someone was mean to them? Will the dinosaurs ever come back? What happens when you die? What even is cottage cheese?
This morning we waited behind a classmate who was mid-collapse, wailing, while the girl’s mother delivered far too many “one last kiss” kisses. He walked in without looking back, his teal Fjällräven, stuffed with bug spray, sunscreen and a never worn rain jacket.
He was so brave. I tried my best.
When I got back to my car, I cried for almost an hour.
This afternoon, he gave his day a “big thumbs down.” Nothing else. He has a life that I can never fully know, only receive in pieces. I will gather every crumb that falls from his mouth in the car, over coloring pages, in a voice too loud for bedtime.
They say time is a thief. But it isn’t, really. It doesn’t take anything. It just keeps arriving, daily, like the weather. And the mail.
Time is a crime with no criminal.
The evidence is piling up in every direction. My husband’s knees creak when he stands now, and his shoulders ache when he sleeps. And me: wrinkles settling in like ostrich feet at the corners of my eyes, a forehead that holds my worries, everything a little saggier than it used to be: my skin, my edges, my margins. And when our son yells a story at his grandparents, they lean in to hear it. They’re all growing quieter in the same years he’s getting louder.
One of these days he will cross the street without taking my hand. There will be a last time he sleeps in our bed, warm and starfished and smelling of watermelon bubble bath. We won’t know it’s the last time until months later, if at all. Mama has already evolved into mommy, next, mommy into mom, and mom into silence, and each one will be correct and each one will take a little of me with it.
Last night he asked me to watch him do a trick, and I said one more minute, and the minute took eleven. By the time I arrived downstairs, he’d done the trick for the cat and moved on to something else. Tonight he said goodnight, his voice already halfway to somewhere I can’t follow.
He’ll say it again tomorrow.
I’ll be there for it, doing my time.