One afternoon Luna tells me, "When I'm a mama, I won't ever make my children wait. I'll come right when they call me. I'll stop using my computer or washing the dishes and play as soon as they ask." She speaks plainly, without a hint of accusation in her voice.
Good luck with that, I think to myself. I say, "Your children will be very lucky," and try not to take her comment personally. It isn't really a comment as much as a statement, anyhow. And five is a little young for the nuances of passive-aggressiveness, no?
I do think about how often I put them off. How frequently the later that I promised never actually comes. Some days are so full of doing for them that there isn't time left for being with them. Time. How can something so irrelevant have such prominence in our lives?
"When will it be soon?" Luna asks me. "Is it later yet?" She counts to ten when I tell her, ten minutes. Time makes little sense to her. Time makes little sense to me and I've spent most of my life hyper-aware of it—so focused on its comings and goings; its absence, its presence. I've had too much and and still not enough of something I can't even explain; something that barely exists.
For a long time I honestly believed that time was speeding up as I grew older. I could not explain how this was possible but I knew it to be true. I thought it must be the same phenomena that made a return trip significantly shorter than the journey out. Once when I was twenty, riding in a car on my way to a babysitting job, I made an off-hand remark to my charge's father about time accelerating. He was a psychologist for whom English was a second or third language, and I was intimidated by even casual conversation with him.
"Ah," he said, suddenly animated. "But time is not changing; only your perception of it." He then happily went into a lecture that took us all the way home. Unfortunately, I never I got clear instructions on what to do with this information. Just knowing that it's all in my head hasn't helped me much.
What I'd really like to know is how to slip back into that mind that doesn't bother differentiating between seconds and minutes. A mind that has little use for soon or later. Maybe, if I pay attention, Luna can help me remember. Maybe, if she's lucky, she won't forget.
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