By Nancy Reddy
@nancy.o.reddy

When my younger son’s asleep, I can still see the baby in his face. In the daytime he’s a wild blur, kicking out a faux tap dance as he watches The Simpsons, singing a little tune in the shower, or throwing toys to the dog. Asleep, his face softens. If I look closely, I can remember what it felt like to hold him when he was a baby, how I’d gaze down at his pursed lips, his puffed-out cheeks, and I’d rise so carefully, trying to lay him down in his crib without waking him. 

In those days, I was always trying to put the baby down. I’d stare down at his perfect beautiful face as he nursed and feel filled with love, then look around at the laundry to be folded, the books going unread, the student essays to be graded, my own notebooks left empty while writing itched inside me and I patted a baby to sleep. I knew I was supposed to be savoring every minute of their babyhoods, but sometimes I wanted nothing more than to rush through until a time when it would all be just a little easier.

When my older son was born, two years before, I was in graduate school, trying to figure out how to be an academic and a writer, a person and a mother. I passed my doctoral exams just a few weeks before giving birth. In the daytime, the baby took long naps, and I sat on the back deck in the thick heat of high summer in the upper Midwest trying to think about the dissertation I was supposed to be starting. Sleeplessness snapped the thread of each sentence as I started it. The baby needed me, and I needed my brain to work, I needed just a minute to myself to think a thought. But I was never really alone then. Even when he slept, even when I walked a few blocks to the library or drove to the grocery store, I could feel the cord connecting me to the baby. When I left the baby, I felt as if my skin was peeling off, stretching to stay with him.

When my first baby was brand new, he howled for hours after every time he nursed, and when he was four or five days old, I took him to an appointment with the lactation specialist I hoped would help us. While we waited, the receptionist peeked into the car seat where he was sleeping, of course, like an angel and not like a baby who screamed so hard and long in the middle of the night that he sweated through the muslin swaddle that was supposed to soothe him. She smiled and said, oh, enjoy it. They’re only that little such a short time. I was not enjoying it. Each day seemed to stretch on for years. I smiled back at her and did not say, that is the kind of thing people say when they have not lived with a newborn for a long, long time.

The thing is: we were both right. Babies are only tiny such a short time, and that short time goes on forever when you’re in it. 

The way my mother tells it, motherhood transformed her instantly. I never liked mornings, she said, but I loved getting up every morning to see you. I’d thought it would be like that for me, too, that motherhood would make me over, so I would be sweet and patient and devoted to the baby, unconcerned about the things that had been my whole life up until then. I’d always been high-strung, Type A, and those traits had mostly served me well. But when my first baby was born, that base level of anxiety cranked up so that for years I felt an electric current running underneath my skin. Because that feeling—which I can see now as postpartum anxiety—didn’t align to the any of the symptoms of postpartum mood disorders I’d read about, I was certain it was my fault. I was bad and angry and anxious. I loved my baby, and I also felt like I’d been skinned.  

My sons are seven and nine now, at the center of their elementary school years. I can’t help but marvel at their growing bodies, as they lie on the couch or lounge in bed; you’re so big, I say. You used to be so small, I say, showing them how I used to hold them with their head on my shoulder and their feet above my waist, and now you’re this big, I say, exaggerating for effect, holding one hand at their head and the other stretched to touch the bottom of their feet. You’re just so big. I was away teaching at a writing conference recently, and when I got home, I told my older son, I think you got taller even over the weekend, as I watched him reach for snacks at the top of our pantry. Of course I have, he said, I’m growing all the time. 

And this, I often think, is what motherhood is, the magical ordinary work of traveling through time together. Sometimes when I look at my older son, I get a flash and he’s 15, his face serious and handsome as he earnestly explains how something works. And sometimes my younger son is still a baby. At the park, running through the overgrown grass, his cheeks pinking with the effort and the heat, I see him as he was at 15 months, just beginning to run, white-blond hair and baby belly in a onesie. When he sits on the couch, he presses his body right against me, or he flops his legs across my lap. Sometimes he rests his hand on my forearm as he pokes the screen of his tablet or stares riveted at cartoons, as if he just needs to know I’m there. We travel through time like this, each of us holding all our past and future selves inside our cells.  

My mother kept beautiful baby books for my sister and me. In mine, real photographs developed from canisters of film, a lock of hair, funny things we said recorded verbatim, all my milestones marked with the date. Photos of play dates and birthday parties, all the babies from the play group lined up on our old navy couch, even when it’s clear we’re all just one wobble away from toppling over.  A note about the day I leaned over in the backseat when my sister was a baby and whispered, you’re my best friend.

For my older son’s first Christmas, we drove home to Pittsburgh, and I sat on the couch at my mother’s, with the baby book laid open across my lap and my baby tucked in beside me. Don’t you wish you could travel back, just for a minute, my mother said, pointing at a photograph of me at 9 months or so in corduroy overalls, and tell her all the wonderful things that will happen. She leaned over to me and said, I wish that I could travel back in time and hold you as a baby, cradling her arms as if she could still feel that tender weight.

The baby books I’ve kept are thin. My sons’ lives are captured mostly digitally, and sometimes we stare together into my phone and watch their lives flow backwards on Instagram. In those pictures, a baby sleeps in his crib, wrapped tight inside a star-patterned swaddle; I hold the baby, just days home from the hospital and gaze down adoringly at his face. The pictures they love best surprise me: a photo from my older son’s third birthday when the baby stole a bite of cake before we’d even finished singing, the Halloween they insisted on the same Catboy costume. Many of them are moments they remember only because they’ve seen the photographs so many times. 

I think about that now, each time I take a picture at a soccer game or school event or ordinary weekday morning. I’m taking it for myself, to hold on to this moment, but now I know I’m taking it for them, too, for the future versions of my sons who will live beyond me, so they’ll know that I was here, that I was paying attention, that I loved them this whole time. Our mothers carry us through time, if we’re lucky.

Now that they’re bigger, I miss them sometimes even as they stand before me. I will always wish I had been a different kind of mother when my sons were small. There is no way back to all the days I rushed through or wished away. But what I know now is how fleeting this time is, too, how before I know it, I’ll look back at these days of packed lunches and soccer practice and after school snacks and wonder where the time went.  

Sometimes I miss those babies so much.  They really are tiny for such a short time. Like my own mother, I wish that I could travel back in time and hold my babies longer. And I wish I could tell that other me, the exhausted thin-skinned new mother, that she’s doing great, that everything turns out fine. I’d tell her those babies are boys now, so funny and tender and smart. 

And look, here they are: freckles and bruised shins and missing teeth and wild cackles and bedtime hugs. We’re traveling through time together. 

Guest essay written by Nancy Reddy. Nancy is a poet and essayist who’s interested in how mothering can enrich and complicate a creative practice. Her most recent books are the poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. She writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful about why writing is hard and how to do it anyway.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.