Tell me, what do we even call this moment we’re living in? A horror movie? The fall of civilization? A democracy death knell? The war on words? Whatever it is, it’s very, very bad.
I’m coping in strange ways. This currently involves a confusing medley of making playlists, reading about Valentine’s Day origins (thanks, Jeanette Winterson), and trying to meditate on walks with my kids. More than anything though, I’ve been thinking about time travel.
It all started when I read this amazing novel, the Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley – a perfect Valentine’s Day warmup. I can’t stop telling everyone to run don’t walk and read it.
The book’s unnamed narrator works in a government department as a “bridge” or a kind of guide for “ex-pats” – people pulled through time, as refugees, from perilous pasts to live in and adapt to 21st-century London. In so doing, she falls desperately in love with her charge, and all kinds of chaos ensues.
It really is an incredible read – heartbreaking, hilarious, brainbending, endlessly quotable. One of those books I’ve been thinking and dreaming about ever since it ended.
I think Valentine’s Day is time travel.
My clients have been time-traveling all week. Despite their better judgment, despite the distraction of daily life, they orient to Valentine’s Day as they would to a wish or a memory. Whether they are sad to be alone, crumbling after a breakup, disappointed in their partners, feeling pressure to perform some Valentine’s varietal of motherhood, or longing for some past or future connection.
Anywhere but here.
At this moment in my own life, Valentine’s Day doesn’t represent much but a need to monitor my kids’ sugar intake. But the longer this time-travel obsession goes on, the more my own collection of Valentine’s flashbacks come through, in surprisingly clear focus:
A flirty, overpriced dinner, interrupted without warning by a vomiting boyfriend.
A crush who appeared to lack interest completely until he met me on a street corner bearing a single rose.
A frantic drunken dance party with beloved friends I no longer talk to that went late into a frozen night.
My youngest bringing the world’s grouchiest valentine home from preschool with pride.
I could go on all day with these.
It’s all time travel ultimately: love and loss and rage and motherhood and poems and songs. All portals we trip into to fall through time.
They each loop us into an endless montage of inner reflection, ridding us of any opportunity to be present in this time right now. Thank god.
*
Most Saturdays, in a somewhat frantic attempt to get my kids out of the house, away from the TV and their inborn drive to bicker, create mess, and complain of boredom, I drag them into the car and downtown to the farmer’s market.
It’s a whole routine.
In warm weather, we buy popsicles. When it’s cold, pastries. Quick sugar doses to motivate us all forward through the crowd. We coo over the dog parade. We stop to sample the fresh juice. We chat with the bread lady who admires the name of my firstborn and sells us sourdough and olive bread in alternating weeks according to each kid’s preference. There’s usually some kind of breakdown at the crafts tables, where both kids attempt to negotiate a loan to buy some item for their menagerie. If I’m lucky, they’ll run around the playground for a bit, despite the clear signs that their playground era is complete.
It’s a sweet if not uninteresting ritual.
It helps me remember the parts of living here I enjoy. Easy weather, communion with live oaks, an overall experience of localness that’s both comforting and awkward: Everywhere we go, we run into my kids’ friends, our old neighbors, and the majority of my therapy clients.
This past week, they broke away from me for a time – walking arm-in-arm, people-watching, pointing at things, turned in with surreptitious chitchat. The look of them from behind, momentarily in sync, tending to the comfort of each other, in deep relation, but in a way that did not include me – it boggled me.
Long before smartphone times, my high school friends and I used to snapshot moments we wanted to remember. One of us would notice something, then mime drawing a square around the scene, scissor-cut it out with our fingers, fold it up, and put it in our pocket. A brief wish that some random moment in our teenage tableaux would be stored and remembered.
Here in midlife, I tried mindfulness. I trailed my two through the park attentively, telling myself: Just stay here. Just notice THIS.
It didn’t work very well.
Like any any ritual, there’s so much opportunity for presence, if only the time travel weren’t so persistent.
All the time I spent trying to meditate, before motherhood and after – all useless while trying to just observe my kids walking on a random Saturday. No amount of breaths counted could help me once I started hearing from the other parts of myself, all with very different agendas:
One part was already bracing for this moment of peaceful independence to end, for them both to resume their barnacle behavior.
There was a part who flashed backward in time to each of them as infants, floppy and helpless, part of my body even when not. This part admitted to missing them and was also so happy this time is over.
There was another part who grew solemn and sentimental, racing ahead into the future, imagining my kids as tall adults, walking together in cities where I don’t live, maybe even long after I’m gone.
Naturally there was also a part who was gaslighting me with some “Enjoy every moment!” bullshit.
All the worlds and times blurred together, and I ended up sort of existentially stupefied. I can’t notice a moment with them without looking toward the ancestor-moments that got us here or the moment’s inevitable great grandchildren. Certainly not present in any form of the word.
In another book that kept me up at night, The Nursery, Szilvia Molnar’s narrator describes her own kind of time travel: “Motherhood might be about having lost my mind, and I am about to spend the rest of my life searching for it.”
For a while, early motherhood felt like a present moment I couldn’t unglue myself from, which only made me strain harder against it. Nicole Graev Lipson describes this “gift of desperation” so beautifully in her interview here.
The search for my mind and memory and self, or some remote echo of them seemed impossible for the longest time.
If I could go back, I’d let myself know how differently time shows up now.
I’d send a valentine. A kaleidoscope – dizzying and complete. My two humans just walking right through it. My own time-travel machine.
Where is time travel taking you lately?
What’s challenging you to be mindful these days?
What’s your favorite love song right now, in this very moment?
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