briefly, forever
balloons, birthdays, and also, the infinite
Driving to Harris Teeter with both kids in the back, I run the finger math again. Has it been three years or four?
Zero to one - that’s one year.
One to two - that’s two.
Two to three, that's three.
Three to four, that's four.
Four.
He’s turning four, which you’d think meant he was about to start his fourth year of life - nope.
He’s starting his fifth.
Even at 38, in my 39th year of life, I’m learning new things.
all aboard
“I want to walk today,” he says, leaving Emma June with the responsibility of operating both steering wheels of the plane cart. She accepts with a screech and we’re off.
Heading past the easter candies to the floral department, he is electric and kind, gesticulating wildly with his paw patrol milk cup.
Who knows what his actual birthday will bring. He could be clingy or destructive or start another hunger strike. Probably all three.
They’re just phases, everyone tells us, soon to pass, nothing to worry about.
Often I wonder if we ever stop going through phases, or if we just stop affording each other the grace and attention to notice.
Or maybe they just take longer. In The 1000 Day Molt, Michael Dean says that humans, like praying mantises and other such insects, experience the painful psyche ego death of change in roughly 1,000 day intervals.
My last molt was July 2, 2023. Is that the day we decided to leave LA?
The next is scheduled for March 28, 2026, Will I feel fully and truly like a dad to two little kids by then?
flowers and balloons
The kids busy themselves with a spinny thing full of tiny balloons.
It’s a boy!
Congrats!
Thanks!
A half relaxed, half super stressed lady fills a giant, gold balloon of the number “4” with helium. “Who’s turning four?” she asks, knowing full well the answer.
Wilder doesn’t hear, too busy bonking Emma June with a smiley face balloon.
“Who’s turning four?” I say, slower and louder, like a translator.
He raises his hand. Shy in front of anyone who pays him the attention he most wants. A walking contradiction, he is shy in front of anyone who pays him the attention he most seeks. like his dad, like us all, just not so good at hiding it yet.
“Happy birthday!” she says, and means it.
He beams, giddy but reserved, afraid to share the bigness of himself with strangers. Like father, like son.
But not like daughter, not yet. Emma June is free, often spasming with joy that’s too much for her body to hold. Right now though, she’s quiet, prying open the sliding cabinet under the salad bar.
Looking over her shoulder with a nothing-to-see-here face, she plops a foot into the cabinet.
“No Emma June that’s where the salad bar stuff goes.”
The balloon lady attaches a heavy plastic see-through clothespin to the giant “4” so it doesn't fly away, then hands it to Wilder.
I neither think nor say "got one that'll keep these two rascals close?"
In spite of myself, I want so badly in moments like these for someone to see me and go "wow, what a dad." To notice how hard it is. To dissolve the guilt I can’t help but feel whenever I get frustrated and fall apart.
That need, to be seen, to be special, it doesn't go away. it morphs. Molts.
Waiting for the giant rainbow balloon that Wilder also requested, I see there’s a ‘family circus’ style path of spilled milk snaking through the store.
“I don’t want it,” he says and I say nothing even though I suggested he leave it in the car. Logic has no place here, among these tiny gods, as Isabel Cowles Murphy puts it.
When does logic take over? When do we stop letting ourselves feel everything so big?
I take the paw patrol cup and put it on the counter.
I hate that show, but every time he refers to the dogs as ‘pups’, I melt. If molting is painful, melting is its opposite.
Involuntary, a sneeze of the soul, it dissolves the tough exteriors we’ve built up, molt after molt, to keep us from ourselves.
does it though?
I hate when people tell me “it goes by so fast.”
It can’t be that simple. They’re not paying enough attention, that’s all, stuck on their phones maybe. Not me though. No, I’m going to savor it like wait HOW THE FUCK DID FOUR YEARS GO BY THAT WENT FAST??.
I hate how normal it makes me to say stuff like this. How cliché, blasé, gauche, kitsch.
What’s next - I’m afraid of death?
Get real. I’m different. Unique. Wacky.
Terrified.
Time is running out and we’re just getting started.
We need more time.
Maybe I can get him held back in school. Nothing crazy - a couple years of K-5, one during middle school, and two more in high school. There was a 38 year old in my freshman year at college and he was - no, he was weird as shit. And so old.
Or was he just old like I am now? In his 39th year, acting like he’s still 38.
parking lots are made for this
Back in the car, it’s quiet, weirdly, as we kill time before soccer. I’m chugging a coke zero when -
“Dad?” he says.
“Yea?”
“Dad, I love spending the day with you.”
“Aw bud, I love spending the day with you too,” I say, gutted dead.
“I love the sound of your voice.”
“Wow you do? What does it sound like?,” I ask, melting.
“Dada.”
I look back at him, sitting there with his giant eyes and open smile, nothing to hide, safe here in the car, and I am gone.
No thoughts, no ideas, nothing. I’m lost. Melted into him, us, it, god, now, now, now.
For a moment, we sit there, outside of time. Timeless. Infinite.
To say ‘it goes by too fast” implies that ‘it’ happens in time. Through time. But the magic of this deep love is precisely how it exists outside of time entirely.
Inside these brief interludes, the concept of time makes no sense. Nothing does. That’s the point.
The curtains fall, and there it all is, the whole thing, him and you and us and we.
Briefly, forever.
Time does not exist.
And then it does.
“Dad are we gonna go to soccer?”
“Yea,” I say, tears gurgling up my throat.
Driving now, I break down quietly, overwhelmed with the size of the feelings I’ve spent so long, in spite of myself, trying to hide.
the three times
Wilder’s concept of time has three distinct units: yesterday (all days before today), today, and tomorrow (all days after today).
Soon, his birthday will be yesterday,
Soon, his next birthday will come tomorrow.
Soon, it will be just another night - dread and tears, boo-boos and laughter.
Soon, we’ll finish dinner early.
Soon I will say, “Let’s go for a walk.”
“NO!”
“You say that every time,” I’ll remind him because its true, “and then, on the walk you’ll tell us that you’re really glad we went.”
Soon, we’ll walk “the loop,” as he calls it.
Soon, about a block from home, like clockwork -
“I really loved this walk,” he’ll say.
“And you know the best part,” I’ll say, like I do every time.
“What?”
“It’s not even over yet.”
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Writing this stuff takes forever, time I only have if I can say to Lauren, “look babe, the money is POURING in.”
comments
Does it go by too fast?
Birthdays? Yay or nay?
Is time real?
What time is it?
I used to think I was holding parenting at arm's length because I was a feminist. Like: "I was made for MORE THAN THIS, stop trying to make me this one thing!" And bloop, I missed a few years, distracted by my somebodiness. I hate to admit that, but I have to admit it. I was racing around, trying to be important to the world when I *was* a whole world to the best kind of person--a soul yet un-shellacked. Kids are the greatest example of what's good about humanity. I'm so glad I got wise before mine grew up. I still work, I'm still busy, don't get me wrong. But when I'm with them, I let them all the way in. "The best part is, it's not even over yet." I'll remember that line.
You're showing me--we don't hold these years at arm's length because we're any kind of "ist" we hold them at arm's length because we know we're training for our own obsolescence and that if we let our kids fully change us, they'll smash our hearts to smithereens. As they should. Anyway, at a certain point, if you're lucky, you realize you're too soft to fuck around. You just go there--all the way, all the time. It hurts even as it's happening. Sometimes I feel like sinking in deep I am actually breaking my own heart--and I am. I'm breaking it open. Wider and wider.
Somebody recently said "What goes in early goes in deep." Wilder and Emma June know they're affecting you. They are so damn lucky. It's everything, that you let them. That they get to see.
people / writers will talk forever about how gd hard it is to capture parenting with language - you've done it.
"She accepts with a screech and we’re off."
"Heading past the easter candies to the floral department, he is electric and kind, gesticulating wildly with his paw patrol milk cup."
“Who’s turning four?” I say, slower and louder, like a translator.
this made me cry and feel so inspired. keep going <3