Saturday, September 15, 2012

Time After Time


Oof! This is my expletive. My husband will remind me that there have been others in my repertoire that have elicited our alarm and amusement when subsequently pronounced by resident preschooler and kindergartner. But Oof will effectively express my exasperation. Most of the time.

Oof! to punctuate the seventeenth time I’ve told them to get their shoes on and wait by the door.

Oof!  when I’m carrying five grocery bags, two knapsacks, socks, sweatshirts, keys, and a stuffie, and one kid pronounces that s/he’s too tired to walk and needs to be carried; and the other chimes in.

I will venture that Murphy, famed creator of unassailable laws, was a mom. Volcano and play-dough (from scratch!) - making projects are creatively conjured on the singular days that I’ve set aside for organizing.


Oof! I shout as the water, flour, and food coloring mixture spills over. 
“Gozal!”: the kids’ joint response darts back at me. And stuns me, surprises me, delights me. [Oof (אוף!) in Hebrew, spelled differently, is also the imperative form of the verb ‘to fly’. There is a song; a wonderful, simple, evocative Israeli song called Oof Gozal (עוף גוזל) – “Fly Little Suckling” -- about the choked up experience of letting go as one’s young ones leave the nest.] 

With a play on semantics, with a dose of humor, a measure of the unexpected, my perspective has shifted. I am smiling.

Suddenly the exhausting phase, it seems, has been exhausted, and a dazzling moment sets in. 

With the shift in perspective, time’s ephemeral nature sinks in, and a flitting inkling congeals.

Later at night: “Come here, give me some five year old hugs, soon you’ll be six already!” I say to my first-grader, as he lies restively in bed. “I only want to grow until my Bar Mitzvah”, he counters, sullenly.

Right. I’ve heard it before. The reasoning is clear. Sebastian doesn’t want to grow up because then he’ll die. So what if he’s got many good years to live, he doesn’t want to die at age 100 either. He doesn’t want to not be able to breathe.

I start to utter a few words about peacefulness and a long life while internally beckoning the spirit of motherhood wherever she may be, to instruct me with the “right answers”.  “But what about after 2 weeks of being dead I’ll want to come back to life?” Sebastian pitches. Um. I gulp and furrow my brows. I take in a long inhalation to mask the tangled and hesitant feelings scrambling inside. And then I start: well, your spirit will always be with us because people will remember you and talk about you like we talk about – HERZL! -- he pipes in (Theodor Herzl: father of modern political Zionism and visionary of the Jewish state, a figure S knows well from a Hebrew children’s musical DVD narrating the history of the State). Why yes, Herzl. Safta (my grandmother) was what I was going to say; the spirit we evoke when we eat ice cream for dinner. But just as well. 

[Certainly, there’s a link between the political Zionist figure of the late 19th century and the vivacious pioneering woman who lived and breathed Zionism in the early 20th century.]

However, the direction I was forging was upended and Sebastian simply declared: “Well when I die I want you to sing to me the song that Collins sings to Angel.” OOOOOHHH LOVER I’LL COVER YOU!! That was that: end of discussion. I could exhale. As I leaned over my child and started softly singing “five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes”, he corrected me: “not minutes, kisses.” And I ached to cover him with them. 525,600 of them. 


Liliana inhabits another plane; she wants to reach the ripe age of 97 like her imaginary “big sister”. 
“When is it gonna be my birthday?” “I want to go to Mexico!” In another three months. We will. My dismissive replies beget the typical moan: “but it takes a long time.” And she’s right. It does take a -- long -- time. Especially since we have no plans, funds, or vacation time to go to Mexico.

I feel like I teeter between halting time and hustling it along. Mexico would be so nice.

But while the anticipation (for birthdays and Mexico) is grand, playing “school” in her bedroom or eating watermelon will yield a “best day ever!” exclamation. That’s the thing about this three and a half year old. “Everything” goes. When asked what she wants or likes, it’s “everything”; when poised with a choice, it’s “all of them.” There’s a sense of expansiveness there that’s freeing, that encompasses the what might be (the ubiquitous “I want you to buy me this for my birthday”) and the what is (watermelon juice trickling down the chin).


Just the other day, while dropping Liliana off at daycare and settling into the sofa by the window for our morning story-time parting routine, I instructed her to go choose a book. She returned with Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever and sidled up next to me. 

I began reading… and sobbing. When my girl turned to me with a puzzled chortle asking why I was crying I answered because it’s beautiful. She instructed me that if it’s beautiful I need to smile. Like this. 

And I did.

Time does its own thing. We want it to soar, to float, and to stand still, at turns. But it just marches. Onwards.


It often feels like the moments flit and the phases linger. But I think it’s the other way around. The phases flit and the moments linger. It is the moments that we revisit. 

Like a story time snuggle; a glance at a sleeping child; a shout (oof!) that collapses into a laugh.  Like the lyrics to a good song, or the words in a good book; that elicit the tears, time and time, again.

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