About Time

I haven't blogged in a week because one thing got in the way of another. It started with the Noodle getting sick for a couple of days, and the cats getting sick, and then everyone just generally being under the weather. As I result, I did everything I had to do, but not everything that I wanted to do. 

It might seem hard to understand how two days at home with a five-year old could be so much less productive than two days working from home. I mean, most of the time she just lay around on the couch and watched TV. But that is not how that works.

Why? 

Because time, man. 

I just started reading this book my dad recommended called About Time, by physicist Adam Frank. I'm only a few pages in and think that it's heading in a sort of "OMG why does math explain reality?" direction (could be wrong; I'd read the blurb but you know, Kindle and apathy). 

But as of whatever page I'm on, it is about how time is mediated by our (culturally-determined) interaction with the material world. How we engage the world determines how we slice up time--which in turn affects our culture. For example, early farmers realized that celestial events could show them the best times to plant. This discovery then affected their mythologies about those celestial events, which in turn shaped the way they spoke of and measured time. The division of time into night and day, into growing seasons, into multi-year planetary orbits, into hours and seconds, was brought to us by our own cultural evolution. 

What's my point? Good question. I wrote that last paragraph before cooking and eating dinner so I need to group...Okay. My point is (and I may be making a jump here) kids have time and I never have any. For example, having just asked my kids to "give me ten minutes"--they have returned every 5-10 seconds, which has made the last three minutes feel simultaneously like no time and also like infinity, depending on who you ask. 

So last week, time was but a treacly morass for my poor sneezy Noodle, an eon of daylight followed by an age of darkness. Whereas I, a modern woman, was trying to get ish done by CoB. At my workstation at the dining table, I had to-do lists and deadlines and appointments (now cancelled). Instead of doing those, I kept hopping up to fetch water or cut fruit or dispense medicine or read books or move handfuls of clothing from station to station along the Infinite Laundry Loop. ("Hey, what did you last week?" "Nothing.")

Over in Noodle World, the afternoon was measured in cartoon episodes, each one simultaneously a whole lifetime and also the mere blink of an eye. 

I glanced at the clock. "We have to leave in a minute, sweetheart," I said.  

"I have to go to the bathroom," she says. 

"Huh?" I'm in the middle of an email, talking and typing. "...You have to what? Oh, that's perfect. Let's turn off the TV, you use the restroom, I'll finish this email, we'll get dressed and pick up your sister, then we have to stop by the post office and the grocery store, okay?

The Noodle's eyes open...and close. And open...and close.

"I have to pee," she says. 

"Great!" I grab the remote and turn off the TV. "You do that, I'll wrap up this email, I need socks, you start getting your shoes on, let's not forget the bag for groceries, and then we'll head out okay? It's quarter to, so we should get going." 

I return to my email, stopping on the way to register that the hotel confirmation arrived (sweet!), shoot a "haha" back to a mom group on FB messenger to indicate that I've been paying attention, and also answer a quick question on WhatsApp because it's been like 7 minutes since they wrote and I don't want to be rude. This is adulthood. Our seconds have seconds. Our effing downtime organizes itself into micro-draining micro-obligations, which take up micro-time in our micro-schedules. Micro-ha!

Boom! Email done. Close laptop, grab socks...

The Noodle is on the couch. Her eyes open and close. 

I say, "Babe I know you're not feeling well, but we have to just power through and actually we really need to get going so can you get your boots on?"

"Mom!" she says. "I can NOT get my boots on. I still need to pee!" 

"Dude! Go pee! We gotta go!"

Her eyes open. And close. 

"I'm tired," she says, and looks at me with big, weepy eyes. Every time she breathes, a little rivulet of snot jerks back into her nose. She's so fragile, like a baby bird. 

I sat down on the couch and gave her a hug. We missed the post office and the grocery store, CraftyDad picked up the other kid, we ordered in and it really didn't matter. I didn't get s*** done last week, and actually, come to think of it, it's FINE.

It's also FIN.  

And the moral of this story is (gird your loins): I've taken some time to realize that we have to to make time to have time. Now is the time to take a time out, lest we run out of time to take time in. I forget that, like, all the time.