One of my favorite conversation starters is: Where are you temporally? What time do you live in? Five minutes in the past? Four weeks in the future? In your head, are you most often reviewing memories from three years ago? Or are you envisioning what you're going to do tomorrow?

For many years, my answer has been two to four hours in the future. I'm always trying to work out what is around the very next corner and how I should adjust and prepare to meet it. 

Recently, my answer has changed. Motherhood has unmoored me from my time zone.

This past Saturday, my son turned 6 months old, which is strange because he was born two days ago and also I have known him my entire life. 

To celebrate his half birthday, my husband and I brought him to a Toys R' Us inside a Macy's to buy stuff with a gift card I got at my work baby shower. A true relic from the past. I no longer work at that job, and I can barely remember what life was like before my son was here.

While browsing the clothing section, I found a pair of pajamas with dogs on it and held it up for my husband, my tear ducts firing up.

"These look like his newborn pajamas, remember?" I moaned. After I said this, it hit me that this memory I was mourning was only five months ago.

Almost every day my husband and I are blindsided by 4 pm. Where did the day go? I think it slips by us while we’re buckling and unbuckling, velcroing and unvelcro-ing, putting down and picking up. The preparation to go somewhere and do something takes more time and effort than the actual activity itself. My husband and I are aware of this irony. Our baby isn’t. For him, it's all the main event. 

The last time I rented roller skates, the person behind the counter asked how old I was. Without skipping a beat, I answered "27." I was 31. Those four years hadn't made much of an impression, apparently. Time is often measured by change, and changes feel minuscule when you’re an adult.

My son is change embodied. Every day he unveils a new skill, a new sound, a new strength. For example, he now sleeps exclusively on his stomach. As soon as we put him down in the crib, he confidently rolls over and snuggles his face against the mattress. This is a sleeping position that would have had CPS called on us only two months ago. 

I can't believe time is going to continue at this rate. Is rate even the right word? Rate implies a fixed speed, and time's new speed strikes me as erratic. One wake window is an eternity. The next is gone in a blink of an eye. Sometimes I am nailed to the present with my baby, so engrossed in him that my concept of time evaporates. Other times, I can't keep myself glued to the here and now, instead floating years into the future and imagining him as a little boy, a teen, a man. 

With my new temporal dislocation, the call isn't just coming from inside the house. Other people are often asking me to time travel.

"You think it's hard now? Just wait until they're older."

"He looks like you when you were this age."

"You'll miss this."

These comments ask me to zoom forward or zoom backwards or, most trippy of all,  zoom forward and then look backwards. 

I understand why parents say these things. In the first weeks of his life, I saw my newborn as just a newborn. Now I see that he contained the seeds of my 4 month old and my 5 month old and my 6 month old. When I gaze at early photos of him, tiny and pink with puckered lips and marble eyes, I see the beginnings of his gummy smile and long eyelashes. We can't let a child be a child. We see them as an invitation to reflect on time's machinations.

One of the pleasures of narrative is how writers can manipulate time. Shrink it. Expand it. Skip it. Weave it together to reveal something unexpected.

The recent popular thriller The Silent Patient's memorable twist toys with the reader's assumptions about the two narrative threads' timing. This twist reminded me of the twist in the first season of Westworld. And of course, before Westworld, Saw II (iykyk)

When I think of writers manipulating time, I think of Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, which I read back in 2016 before the movie adaptation Arrival came out. I thought Chiang's subversion of chronology, mirroring the heptapods' teleological approach to time and causality, was very clever. Now I don't think it's clever at all. Just true. Parenthood alters how you feel about time and causality. 

I've thought a lot about Story of Your Life over the last few months, thought about it more than I have in years. Something about the sensation of living two timelines at once – the beginning of my baby's life and the beginning of my life as a mother – reminded me of the novella's structure. Juggling these two experiences, I worry I neglect one in favor of the other or let one overshadow the other. The physical pain and sleep deprivation of early motherhood made me want time to speed up while my awe over my son made me want to slow it down. It doesn't feel right that the two experiences had to unfold simultaneously.

Midwife and writer Robina Khalid shared this excerpt from her longer Substack essay "We might be hollow but we’re brave: mothering through the unfathomable Inevitable" on her instagram:

I related to how motherhood inspired Khalid to time travel. To teleport back to moments from her past and see them in an entirely new light.

In my third trimester, I spent a lot of time ruminating on my impending labor. One therapy session, while vocalizing all my worries, I stopped mid-thought and asked my therapist, "But whatever happens, it'll all make sense, right?."

She nodded.

I trusted time. It had done its magic on every shock, every heartbreak, every mystery and eventually granted me a sense of meaning and peace.

But it's not the same time anymore. It doesn’t move the same. It doesn’t feel the same. It’s not as inconsequential as it once was. I won't ever lose four years again. 35 isn’t the same as 39 because, at 39, my son will be 4, and he will never be 6 months old again. 

My trust that I can let time pass and do the meaning-making for me is gone. Instead, I must bring the meaning to each moment. A jumble of grief and gratitude for all the versions of my son that exist too briefly in the world and then live on forever inside me. I light a candle for each. Being his mother means holding a never-ending vigil. I'm happy to do it.