"I know, I know," I said, sick to death of hearing it. "Everyone tells me, 'Don't blink! It'll be over before you know it!' "
"Actually, you don't know. You can't know until you experience it." She scrawled her signature on the last form. "My kids are forty and forty-two." She seemed edgy. Bitter? Resentful? I wondered, subconsciously, as I often do around testy people, if there was anything I could say or do to make her feel better."But you're so proud of them, right?" I tried. "I mean, I'm sure you miss them being so little, but I bet there are wonderful things about being a Mom to grownups. Right?"
She stared at me. Not kindly, either. "It's not about what I miss or what I like. It's about the passage of time. You can't stop it or catch it. It's like water in a sieve."
She looked down again at the tiny human in my arms, and her expression softened a little. "Well, let's get you home." She stood and helped me into a wheelchair. Wordlessly, she pushed us out of the room, down the elavator, and into the soft spring air to my husband's waiting truck.
It took years figure out what she was saying to me. It took getting dunked into the everyday work of being a parent to really understand the elusiveness of time.
The days have been long—sometimes painfully so—but oh, oh how quickly the years are going. I've been marveling as my children turn into real humans. My friends tell me this is just the beginning; they say it'll just be a minute until I'm an empty nester and I won't know what happened.
Why, then, do days sometimes seem like an endless slog of sameness, in spite of what will, someday, feel like rapid change?
A friend of mine has taught sixth grade for over twenty years. A few months ago, over a cup of coffee, she mused, "I spend my days with people who are always the exact same age. It's like time stands still in my classroom." Ahhhh, yes, I thought, struck: There it is. Time stands still for teachers, who work with young people in the beginnings of their lives, day after day after day, and those students stay the same age. Then, if we're parents, we go home and contend with the unexpected marvel of our own little people turning into bigger and bigger people. This is the quandary of educators, especially if we haven't changed jobs or grade levels much. It's why time is such a fickle thing for us. That's why we can say, with a completely straight face, "This week flew!" and then, in the next breath, "God, this week seemed to take ten days." And we are precisely, exactly correct in saying both.
The nurse was right. It isn't only about what we love, hate, dread, desire, aspire, or regret, or what we miss when it's gone. It's also about capturing time when we can, and about understanding that it's immeasurable. We can't control time and we certainly can't change how it feels as it flows by. And we don't know until we experience the elusiveness of it. Like water in a sieve.
