My Family and Other Globalizers | The trickster called time

Time is even weirder than quantum mechanics aficionados know it to be: once you have children, the days become far longer than the years. (Representational image: Anne Nygard via Unsplash)

Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.

Clock time with its neat divisions into minutes and hours is one of the biggest hoaxes humans have played on themselves. Time is, in fact, anything but logical or organized. It stretches and contracts on whim; it morphs from solid to liquid. And my time is almost never the same as yours: time is subjective.

We are lulled into clock-time’s maya from having been subject to school calendars and work agendas, but once we become parents, the veil is lifted. Time, we realise, is even weirder than quantum mechanics aficionados know it to be. Because once you have children, the days become far longer than the years.

I remember attending a party in Beijing about a month before I was due with Ishaan. I was the only invitee who hadn’t yet birthed a human. And when I confessed that I was nervous, the other ladies immediately set about laying my worries to rest.

“Oh, just get through the first two weeks and it’ll be fine,” cooed one of them.

Another, interjected, “Oh come on, be realistic. It’ll be two or three months before you find your balance.”

“You mean, one or two more years,” a third said, sending everyone into peels of laughter. Only I felt devoid of mirth. Had she just said, years?

In the event, every time I met a milestone – six months, one year, 24 months – more experienced mothers would update the timeline for “when it all got better.”

“By the time he’s walking, it will be easier.”

“Once he’s talking, you’ll see it will fall into place.”

“After about 5, they start becoming logical. It’s much easier.”

Until having a baby, long-term planning had meant making a reservation at a fashionable restaurant a week ahead. Having children threw time out of whack. What was all this talk about a five-year plan? I wasn’t the Communist Party of China.

Everything felt like forever. Ishaan was a colicky baby and cried, pretty much non-stop, for the first four months of his life. That’s four calendar months. In subjective time, it was more like four centuries.

A few weeks in, I’d felt that I’d made a terrible mistake; that I was not cut out to be a mother, because I absolutely hated it. Why wouldn’t my baby sleep? Why wouldn’t he stop crying? It must be because I was a bad mother.

With hindsight, these feelings were laughably overwrought. The great truth of being a parent is that when it comes to kids, everything passes. My spouse had tried to get me to see this early on. I remember him trying to cheer me up after I’d wrestled Ishaan to sleep following a six-hour crying jag. “I’m sure by the time he goes for a college interview Ishaan will have stopped crying,” he’d joked. But I hadn’t smiled in response.

The question was: when? When would things change? And would I have been changed irrevocably by then? The answers, of course, were: ‘soon,’ and ‘yes – it’s called growing up.’

Nowadays, when I look at Ishaan’s puffy-toddler cheeks in old photographs, as the 13-year-old he has become saunters by, phone in hand, fuzz on lip and pimples-in-waiting, all I can think is: where did the time go? How can years and years just disappear? How did this gangly teenager take over my baby’s body?

I remember the ocean of time that had stretched ahead of me when he was small. Time needed before he’d be able to talk and tell me what he wanted instead of tantrumming. Time needed before he’d be able to eat a meal without covering the floor and me in daal. Time needed before he could start kindergarten, so that I could snatch a few hours a day for myself.

And now, all I want is to hit the pause button on time. To keep him to myself a while longer. To still share the occasional bedtime cuddle. To have him tell me about his little hurts, physical and other. To savour the ephemeral. Because in the end, you have your kids on borrowed time and it passes in as achingly beautiful a moment as a sunrise.

As the writer, Alice Walker put it: “Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.” It’s quite the trickster, time.