The mums and Halloween decorations have been in the stores since last month. A few weeks ago, I got a promotional email about getting my Christmas list done now. And I wonder what happened to time? It is careening into winter already and I don’t understand why. What happened to the softness of the in-between? Warm days with cool nights — this is perfect. So why do we rush it? Why can’t we just be here now, in this season of our lives, in this time?
As a parent of a young child, I think about this constantly. I want to give my son time to explore and see the world. I want my son to live at least some of his life with his own lack of a sense of time. But I also have to get things done, so I am always thinking ahead. I am trying to teach him so many things, and so many of those things seem to have to do with understanding time.
A perfect example of this is when I needed to get a birthday card for my brother. It should have been a nothing little errand, simple. But I have a toddler, and so it was anything but simple. My baby wanted out of his stroller, and then also out of my arms. He wanted to walk around and look and touch everything. He wanted to hold my money, take everything out of my wallet, and we did all of this, but then I almost spilled my coffee on the card I was buying and the baby pushed his stroller into a display rack. I said to the woman running the store, “I am sorry I am making this such a hard transaction for you.” She said: “Moms always have the right of way, take your time.”
Take your time. What a lovely thing to say to someone, especially someone with a child who does not know time, not yet.
My son does not know time as I know it. He doesn’t know that I want to go into a store, look at the cards for maybe a minute, pick one, buy it and leave. For him, time is right now, not rushed or squeezed in around other things. To him, why wouldn’t we spend all day in the store looking at it all, touching and playing with everything? To him, time is not to be filled to overflowing with things to be crossed off of a to-do list. There are instances when I need him, or really want him, to understand my sense of time, but he also needs me to understand his.
I thanked the shopkeeper and told her how I am trying to understand time as my son is seeing it. She then told me a story of how she made that realization, and it made me cry. It might have been the stress, but I think it was the beauty of the story. She told me: “When my daughter was little, 30 years ago now, we went to vote and she was at the age where she wanted to do everything herself, like climb the stairs into the polling station. I was letting her do that and, of course, she was very slow and there was a woman coming in behind us and I said to my daughter, ‘Oh, let’s move aside to let people pass,’ and the woman said, ‘Go right ahead, I have time for little girls.’ ”
I think about that story so much. No one, it feels like now, has time for little girls. And I wonder if my lack of patience sometimes, my inability to adjust to my son’s sense of time, will carry over into something larger.
When I rush him, when I ask him to live his life on my schedule, what am I teaching him? Patience is a virtue, but it’s a necessity while parenting. Being patient is a quality I would like to teach my son — but how, when it feels like we are always out of time and already onto the next task and the next season?
I would like for my son to understand time and patience, and not just in a physical sense. I want to teach him to be patient in the way he listens to people speak, to think and listen before he speaks or judges what he hears and sees. I want him to see other people’s actions through a patient lens of not knowing where they might be coming from, what they might be going through. And I want him to have time for small things, kind comments, thoughtful actions.
I want to teach my son to have time for little girls, to be a person who has time for women in the sense of understanding that the definition of a feminist is a person who supports equal rights for men and women.
This is a lot to teach someone who does not understand time.
This is when I realize I am not raising a child but a future adult, and it feels overwhelming. The world I think needs more good men, more good people, and how, how, how do I do that?
I will start, because I do not know how else, with taking this in-between time. For today it is the not-summer-but-not-fall in our lovely valley. For my son, it’s the not-a-baby-but-not-yet-a-boy. The season is now and it is his life and we will take time and it will be my son’s time.
As much as I can, we will use our time together to look and touch and see the world, as he wants to, for now. While we have this very sweet season together, even if the coffee is spilled and the birthday card is still not sent, for now we have today, for now we have the time.
C.S. Hammond lives in Hartland. Email her at cshammond36@gmail. com.