At War With Time
And germs.
We’ve been sick for weeks. I won’t bore you with the details, but picture one of those clown punching bags, flattening to the floor with each hit, popping back up only to be slapped down again. My family is the clown. So when I tested positive for the flu, I went Zen. What else is a beat-down clown to do? We’d had such a healthy run in the fall. This, the fifth illness in a row, was nothing more than paying our dues. I accepted my fate and shuffled upstairs to rot in bed for a few days.
For about 24 hours, despite the fever and coughing, I enjoyed my time alone. But then the fever cleared and I could hear the life that was going on without me. I missed my kids on a molecular level. I craved the feeling of their little bodies snuggled up to mine.
The next morning, I observed them from a few feet away as they ate breakfast. They looked undeniably older. In the single day that I’d been sequestered, their cells had slightly, just slightly, rearranged.
“Did you girls get bigger while I was sick??” I asked them. They laughed. My 7-year-old jumped out from behind the door, waggling her arms in front of her chest: “Ta da! BOOBS!!!” I cackled so hard it triggered a coughing fit, and I had to sit down on the floor to catch my breath.
Brandi Carlile’s song A War With Time has been in my head ever since I saw her play it in concert during the one-day break between my last illness and this one. And really, you could skip the rest of this essay and just go play that song which, as she described live, recalls a solo trip she took as a young adult and imagines a future when she’ll have to let her own daughters go. I’m living in a war with time, she sings. I wish I didn’t know the things I know.
War is a violent word, but in Brandi’s scratchy-sweet voice, it feels Zen. She’s learned that acceptance is the only weapon we have in this war. The song ends with a helpless, loving, bittersweet dagger to the heart, the reason my tears are so close to the surface this week: But I want you to go / Don’t even ask me just go. I listen over and over, like pressing a bruise, as if repetition will cure me. What else are we beat-down clowns to do?
Obviously not every minute is precious. A half hour spent cleaning up vomit, two hours listening to my daughter cough herself to sleep, twenty minutes bleaching the bathroom after I watch my strep-ridden child wipe her face all over it? I’d rather skip it, but I’m describing my past month, and so I could not. I slogged through those minutes like a battle-weary soldier. And crucially, there were minutes in between those ones that were pure gold; gold like the wedding ring that my husband lost in our five-year-old’s bed. She gave it to him the next morning and said, “I found your ring in the middle of the night, Daddy, but I waited until the morning to bring it to you because I wanted to get all my dreams in first.” I was still in my sick bed when my husband told me that story from our bedroom doorway, and I missed my sweet daughter so much I cried.
This is all I ever write about: time, and how to stop it. How to appreciate it. And how lucky—and, maybe, delusional—I am to see the minutes and hours coming at me in a flood and expect to be able to participate in them. This paragraph from Sheila Heti stopped me cold:
Sometime during my forty-eighth year, I began to overhear myself saying, in conversation, ‘I don’t really need to live much longer,’ or, ‘If I died tomorrow, that would be fine.’ I felt uneasy, surprised and disturbed every time this came out of my mouth. [...] I felt like I knew who I was, and what my life was, and looking to the future, I saw only repetition.
I’ve never read a more compelling argument to develop a deep relationship with the children in one’s life, parent or not, because I can absolutely guarantee that children will inoculate against this ennui, will spin the decades of repetition into gold. Gold like a wedding ring. Gold like the spoils of war.
