Time Warp

My two oldest kids have been back in school a week now, and that has brought with it a profound revelation. I am getting a second chance that a lot of people don’t get—the chance to pour my time and attention into two young children again. This epiphany came to me as I huffed and puffed behind 85 pounds of kid, plastic, rubber, and aluminum. Today, because I’m down to just two, we pulled the double stroller out of storage.

With Addison in school all day for the first time, I feel like I’ve traveled back in time six years to the last time I spent the majority of my time with a preschooler and toddler. Despite the differences in gender, personality, and a slightly larger age gap, it all feels strangely familiar. After a summer spent hauling around an eight-legged mass of children, I’m now back to looking for little-kid parks and hanging out with the 29-year-old moms I find there. I try, mostly unsuccessfully, to remember what it was like the first time around. I see these mothers with their fussy babies and rambunctious two-year-olds and think, “That looks like a lot of work.” Then I remember, “Oh, yeah. I used to do that work. And now I do it with four.” But it’s different now. I think I’m different now.

When my first two were the age my last two are now, I was 32. I was at the height of my career. I felt successful, efficient, invincible. I ran meetings and ran baths, shuffled my kids from place to place, signed them up for KinderMusik, and danced with them to the Wiggles. I warmed Braden’s milk until he was three, read parenting magazines at stop lights, and held onto Addison’s swimsuit while she splashed in our baby pool and I edited. I loved it all, but it felt like so much work, and I gleefully awaited the day when my children would . . . just . . . get . . . older.

And it’s all a blur. I know I did it, but I remember so little of it.

Now I find myself with a second chance. And the biggest difference—the intangible experience that you can’t buy or learn from a magazine or take someone else’s word for—is that now I know how fast it goes. Of course everyone from my mother-in-law to my dentist told me this, but now I know it for myself. As much as I love efficiency and long for time to myself, I am forcing myself to slow down, “unschedule,” and burn the images—the beautiful, fleeting images—into my brain.

This sounds more noble than it is. I can’t say I’m not envious when I see my neighbor—whose two kids are the ages of my older two—head out for a two-hour run or when I walk into her immaculate home. Not a crayon-colored wall or a stinky diaper in sight. But I also feel a little sorry for her, and I know my time will come. And maybe then, five years from now, after I’ve done it all the third and fourth times around, I’ll be ready to close the little-kid chapter of my life. But I sorta doubt it.