Is Tomorrow Just a Word?
Tonight I took a bath with three stray plastic balls, the kind you use for ball pits. They weigh, altogether, about as much as a penny, but I was too tired to take them out. I watched them float aimlessly together from one corner of the tub to the other, connected by some unseen force. They clung to one another and, like myself and my two small children, had nowhere in particular to be.
It’s hard to imagine that just a few months ago I’d rush into my son’s preschool classroom and hurry him out the door before I even kissed him, because 10 minutes late meant another $25 for our baby’s nanny, and my income was barely covering her salary as it was. Since my city passed its shelter-in-place order months ago I’ve been here, at home with both my children. Now the days stretch on forever, not so much passing as accreting. Each day is so similar to the one that came before it that time feels like something cellular, growing by splitting itself over and over again.
It is strange, maddening, and also somehow perfect that this global pandemic has aligned precisely with the stage of my older son’s development in which he attempts to wrangle his own mastery of time through language. He is trying to morph the consummate presence of his babyhood, that glittering expanse, into the framework of mysterious words his father and I throw around so effortlessly — words like today, tomorrow, yesterday, later, right now, just now, and tonight. His tiny finger presses my elbow like a button, as if he’s trying to pause a show to read the closed captioning. “Is it tomorrow?” he asks, sweetly. I try to explain. “No, honey. After tonight’s sleep it will be tomorrow.” The next day he wakes with brows furrowed, already frustrated by all that he senses he’s not understanding. “IS IT TOMORROW, MOM?” he asks as his face reddens. It is never tomorrow and he can’t stand it.
Poring over our wedding photos, he points a jealous finger at his cousin dropping flower petals. “Where was I?” he asks in accusation. “You weren’t born yet,” I explain, and he frowns. Later, we build a fort just the two of us while the baby naps. Underneath the canopy of sheets he turns to me conspiratorially, savoring the saccharine syrup of exclusion. “Baby brother can’t come in here,” he whispers, “he’s not born yet,” as if our fort were life itself, as if the body were an invitation. Often his pondering verges on the poetic. “Is tomorrow just a word, Mama?” he asks wistfully while staring out the window at the alley where he used to jump off curbs with friends.
Truthfully, I’m struggling to gather the will to guide him into our adult lexicon of time, which now feels fraught to me, ensnared in the bizarro hyper-logic of American capitalism. I find myself returning to the moments when time revealed itself to me as something more, like the one night in high school I was out at the beach with the crew of stoner misfits I ostentatiously referred to as my “guy friends.” We sat on the hoods of the older boys’ cars and smoked a joint and I felt a pang in my abdomen, then noticed that the moon was the same shape as the last time I detected that small and precious pain, flaring up like tiny sparks. I felt a secret, ancient thrill — like the moon was speaking to me in a language that none of the boys cracking jokes around me could even hear, let alone decipher. If only momentarily, I understood that time is like the tides that pull at those incandescent, microscopic orbs inside of me, the pieces of myself that I let go and the ones that leave me and the ones that grow until, at last, they emerge as someone new entirely. All are pulled by tides and each of them, my progeny.
And then of course there is the pinnacle — the birth of my first son, when yesterday felt less like a memory and more like a hallucination. All through those early weeks I had a recurring thought that I worried was some form of postpartum psychosis. Was it me who was just born? I’d ask myself a thousand times a day. And this placid, monkish face looking up at me from my own chest had surely been here always, pulling me towards his father, a stranger then, at the party that night — already whole and wanting us to know it.
These quarantine days are so much like those dizzying first few months of motherhood, except now my son can talk and agonize over when, MOM WHEN, his fourth birthday will finally arrive. His birthday stands ahead of him like a mirage. With all that’s disappeared in the pandemic, friends and school and the arcade, he suspects his birthday might never come. In an attempt to offer him some solace, I sit him down at our small dining table to make a paper chain. We cut and loop and tape, each day a different color in stark construction paper relief, the rainbow of the week ending on his bright and purple birthday. “This many days,” I say, and hold it up for him. As I watch his face puzzle over the crude edifice of time objectified, I instantly regret the effort. What would he gain in the cheap satisfaction of ripping off a ring each morning and tossing away the days? The only true thing about the paper chain, I am sure, is the way each rectangle wraps around to become a bright and ceaseless ring, the way the rings all cling to one another.
In this season, when my morning runs zig zag in and out of empty streets to dodge the lingering breath of other humans, when the cobwebs between parked cars cling to my face like stray hairs, I want to borrow my baby’s sense of time. His world is like a shaken bottle of champagne popped open, frothy and fragrant and teeming with life. The inner-tubes of chub encircling his thighs buoy me to this place, this moment, and our entanglement is what keep my mind from drifting too far away into nostalgia or catastrophe. I know what time it is by how far I can wrap the half circle of my hand around his leg, by how much of his face is nestled into how much of my chest.
On our thousandth quarantine walk through the sparse hills of our once-bustling neighborhood, we discover a small alley garden, overgrown and teeming with honeysuckle and ivy. My older son marvels at the bees and flies and flowers and weeds, his new and closest friends, the ones he needn’t give six feet of space, an impossible distance — the full, looming length of his own reclining father. “I’m gonna run,” he says, and then stops himself — his own syntax is a wonder. “What does gonna mean?” he asks. I smile, shrugging my shoulders, and he takes off, beaming, into our small and lonely stretch of wild.
