Time Bandit

Tom Hank's character in Castaway says flippantly that "we live and die by time." This is of course, right before he gets thrown onto a desert island for years to contemplate the error of his ways and slow his act down. It's October already and I find myself awash in ungraded essays, unmarked homework assignments, unanswered letters and emails, unfinished projects and understanding people who nonetheless can't understand why I'm so freaked out by all the "un's" in that sentence.

When I began this blog it was to explore and translate an almost ineffable experience – motherhood – into an intellectual and critical space – not an academic one, but one that might be palatable and tolerable to those with no patience with sentimentality and no truck with too much literary or social theory. Great idea. I just haven't got bleeding time to do it, really. I'm stealing time right now from a combination of essay grading and class prep to bank out at least something to post, even if it's not of the multiply revised quality of my earlier work. More than that, I have denigrated to conversations about housekeeping, fights with spouses, shoe shopping and fussing about having no time as a working mother. Nothing could be more boring, passé, clichéd, or so yesterday. Yes, there were those essays on Virginia Woolf, on Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley and her monsters, on properly appreciating men who do housework, but I'll be damned if I can say that they have been primary in my posts, or that I've done anything but piss off the husband who was lovingly doing my laundry and dishes.

I guess I could say that I'm frustrated a bit in my project and my other uses of time because I'm always going to be robbing Peter to pay Paul and having to explain why. It's not the robbing – I'm used to theft – it's all the bloody explanations. Thieves steal because they want stuff. It’s that simple, really. I steal time because I want stuff. I spent yesterday evening with my husband because I hadn't seen him in four days. But explain that to the students whose papers didn't get back to them and it seems a bit hollow. As far as caring how tough, cool, rock and roll, or hip me or my life is, well there will be time to care once I can find an evening baby sitter who isn't in our social crowd and doesn't want to go to all the same gigs we do. In that my engineer friend, Madame M, was right. Time pressures squeeze the silly and pretentious right out of you. More importantly, when you do have a moment to pause and enjoy how happy your baby son is at the moment, or how much you might love your husband or how cool you think his new idea about eating healthier, setting a dinnertime and eating at the table is, all you can feel is the slowly rising panic of having yet another thing to have to squeeze into a day and you invevitably say the wrong thing. Or at least I do.

But then the baby smiles and it’s like opening a door in your house to find out that there’s a whole other wing full of jewels, art and antiques.

He’s fun and he’s charming, like that Capuchin monkey you’ve always wanted, you know the one who throws poo in the house. But then you and the monkey get trained about the poo throwing and it starts being easier. Connor’s never thrown poo at me, but I did have a rather sizeable turd roll out of the diaper midday once and land half on my foot and half on the floor. With the shit-butted baby spinning around in my favorite chair and the turd on my toes, I had to call Dan in for backup baby holding and turd retrieval. Yeah, that was a good day. I felt competent that day.
And this is the easy stuff. I know where he’s sleeping at night, he’s too little to steal the phone, dial Nepal or order pizza, have a pot connection, drink, smoke, snort anything other than his bathwater or get addicted to anything more potent than Enfamil Lipil AR. I can still hold the cherished dream that he’ll make it to college and get through to choose a professional school; he has yet to tell me he’s dropping out of high school to tour Europe. A Mr. L, an older friend with two college age sons, took umbrage to my article on the gender gap in colleges and universities. “When its in your home,” he said, “ it ceases to be an abstract issue and becomes very personal.” I think about this while I review my perfect parent dreams of our baby going to law school. Of course, first there’s grade school and before that, getting the rest of his teeth.
Yes, yes, yes, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but it teaches you humility and what sleepless really looks like after three months of cumulative effect. It teaches you that you might have been cool, but it’s hard to feel competent with spit-up on your shoulder or shit on your feet. It’s hard to feel cool, calm and collected when your to-do list is kind of like those bathroom towel rollers. As soon as I take something off, there’s something new on and some stuff just stays there til I pay a babysitter to sit with my cheeky little monkey so mom can finish her book manuscript. Today that seems like a good investment of time. Ask Peter, though, he’s the one I robbed to do it.