When I thought about having kids in the past, I had a few reasons for being nervous about it. One of the reasons—not a main one but still a thought I had—was that it would make time seem to move so much faster. They say kids do that, and I was anxious about having time slip through my fingers. Well, I guess my fear came true, because suddenly my daughter is two. They say the days are long but the years are short, and that is just ridiculously true. I feel like I can’t even remember what it was like to hold her as a baby, but it’s probably closer to the truth to say that I stop myself from thinking about it too hard. It’s difficult to know those days are over and were over so quickly.
So, there you go: one of my anxieties was totally legitimate and… it’s actually not so bad. In fact, I am grateful that time marches steadily forward or I never would have heard her call me “Mama.” I look forward to each new day, eager to see her becoming more of who she is. Yeah, it's gone by fast. That was the price to pay to be here for her beginning, and that is a very small price. I'm glad I didn't let my fears stop me. The same amount of time would have gone by without her, and I'd be so much poorer for it. A brief moment with her has more meaning than any stretch of time.
I get to see her learn and grow, astounded that she seems to understand concepts I couldn’t even begin to try to teach. I stressed for a while about how to possibly make her understand the difference between letters and numbers, but somehow she already knows. At least, I know she knows because every number is “two” (though we are making some progress on “nine”), while every letter was “bee” until she started making really quick progress identifying different ones (I think we’ve got about half the alphabet down at this point).
The one thing I didn’t want to be as a parent was neurotic, but I guess we’re all bound to have our silly worries surface from time to time. At least she has made me a lot less anxious about the breakneck speed that everything seems to be going at. Or at the very least, she’s making me see the good in and outside of it.
The length of time, or how it is perceived, doesn't make sense as a metric of value and significance anymore, at least not as a main one. Of course I want to have as much of it as I can with her, but it seems silly now to care about having time for its own sake. The simple fact of being her mom (along with her other mom!) is worth more than the actual quantity of time we get to spend together. That being said, I do pray for as much of it as I can get.
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On my 24th birthday, I felt a sense of doom. Something wasn't right, and my mind started slipping into dark places. Over the next couple of weeks, this spiralled into a full-on depression where I could hardly get out of bed. I slept constantly, when I'm someone who has never wanted or needed a lot of sleep. I went days without eating. I stopped drinking coffee because I found it too painful to be so awake. Music, too, which I used to listen to all the time, stirred up too many emotions for me to handle.