Time is an Architect

The following post was sponsored by Universal Pictures and their new film About Time which is one I highly recommend going to see. (ED: I was not paid to endorse the film. I really did love it. Was not expecting to, honestly. Four stars.)

1. 

I have just returned home after dropping Bo and Revi's preschool application off at the school they will begin attending this summer. Last time I did this was with Fable. I was pregnant with the twins at the time so the tugs were less fierce. I will do this again, someday, said the voice. The voice said the same thing when I signed Archer up for preschool years before. But not now. Today we pull up the rear, hook the caboose to the rest of the cars that in a matter of months will pull out of the station and onto the tracks.

2. 

I recently started noticing wrinkles around my mouth in pictures. I notice them around my eyes, too, so I started doing this thing where I smile without moving my mouth too much. Because if I do smile for real I look... old. This is new and although I sort of anticipated that at some point it would happen, I did not expect to wake up... changed. Time is an overnight success that way. One day you just look older. And then the next day you look that way still and you can't wash it out like a bad hair day or cut sugar for the week or whatever. 

1. 

He stands against me with his head almost to my chin.

"When did you get so tall?" I ask him.

"When did you get so short?' he says back.

And I wonder if in the same way I think he's growing he sees me shrinking. Like, OH, you're a human, actually. You don't know the answers to all the problems. You don't even know how to help me with my math homework.

And he's right. I don't. I was always terrible at math and he knows that now. He knows all of the things I struggle with.

"When did you get so short?"

"When did you get so perceptive?"

2. 

We aren't supposed to like the way we look when we age. We are told in our ears and our eyes  to see age as a flaw worth battling. Tear down and rebuild. Remodel. Remove. Redefine. What if instead of defying age and fighting our faces, we joined them and worked together? Sat down and had a conversation with the changes and the transitions and said, "hey! You scare me and make me feel different. Let's discuss over foods that are good for us and then take a walk and keep discussing?"

1. 

I do not realize that they're aging in fast forward until we run into someone we haven't seen in a few weeks or a month or a few months. "I barely recognized her!" they say. "They're so big!"

They're so big.

They're so big.

But they're not so big also.

And that's the part I am choosing to see at the moment. The smallness of this phase. The tiny fingers and the little boots I can hold in one hand. The little slide being a huge thrill. The moment. That's the wonderful part about the caboose. About knowing that this is it. That this is the last of the toddler years... I can savor these days. Well, most of them, anyway. Some days do not deserve to be savored and yesterday was one of them and I was very happy to wake up the next day and have us all a little older.

2. 

My hair was blonde my whole life until one day I decided to dye it black. I spent four years with short black hair until I got pregnant with Archer and let it grow out and into its natural color. It has looked the same ever since, give or take a haircut. My hair was blonde and then it was black and then it was brown and that in itself is a story. The great compromise of nature and nurture is something I regularly think about in all aspects of my life. The compromise between concealing and sharing, changing and staying the same. I am a natural blonde who colored her hair black once and is now a brunette. That defines everything for me. I am the sum of my natural and unnatural selves. Light/dark. Push/pull. Compromise. 

1. 

My first idea for this post was to write about all the times in my kids' childhoods I wish I could revisit. And then I thought, but if I went back in time, I would miss all of what's happening now. And I want what is happening now to keep happening. Archer's writing books, you guys. He wrote a ninety page book and he's working on another and it's called "The Archer and The Three Strong Sisters" and I want to read every word and be here for him if he has a question about a verb. Because where I cannot help with math, I can with this. I want to watch Fable create elaborate rainbow dresses and witness Revi sneak into Bo's timeout session to rescue her. (That happened yesterday. Bo was in timeout and Revi went into their room, took her sister by the hand and snuck her out into the hallway all the while whispering, "Hi, Bobo. Hi. Bobo, hi. Hi, Bobo.") All of this. ALL OF THIS. This is where the action is.

Everything else is frozen. Still. A puppet without a hand.

2. 

My second idea for this post was to write about a time I wished I could revisit. A moment in my life I could return to in order to improve it with the knowledge I have now as someone older and wiser and... older. Like those heartfelt letters everyone writes to their teenaged or twenty-something selves. And then I realized I had no moment. I don't have any advice to my new parent self. All of the ways I failed and succeeded and said the wrong things and tripped and fell and lied and tried ... but not very hard, mattered. My mistakes more than anything. I wouldn't have not broken up with him, or stayed away from her... I would have still backed my car into my dad's Pontiac the day I got my license. All of those moments, those failures and missteps, brought me to this: A boy writing a book next to his sister drawing a rainbow next to a pair of whispering toddlers, sneaking markers out of the box and into a tiny metal shopping cart Bo will soon push off the steps and watch crash. 

"Uh oh," she'll say. "Again!"

1. 

This is what is happening now. At age thirty-two. Bo pulled her diaper off during a nap and Revi refused to go to sleep with her hair NOT in pigtails and Fable needed me to tuck in her eyeballs for the tenth time and Archer couldn't sleep because "what if there's a universe just like ours and we're all just someone's thoughts and we're living in a universe that is actually a dream?" and one of the walls in our house needs to be replaced because of a leak that's been happening for years and right now there's a hole the size of my body in the hallway and all of our home's insides are just there on display- pipes and wood and brick...  and the moulding is caving in around the front door so we have to go out the side door and Hal and I are laughing at something that we won't think is nearly as funny tomorrow and we're all out of whole milk so we drink our hot chocolate with soy which I used to love and now think is gross.

2. 

I recently got invited to try a new age-defying body wrap skin thing that supposedly takes years off your skin and inches off your waistline and fights age with hundreds of dollars and lasers and creams and wraps so tight you can't breath. It was free for me in exchange for a post and I thought about it for a minute before saying no. I look at my mother who is strikingly beautiful with her gray hair and aging face, her calloused fingers and never-before-waxed brows. She is what aging is supposed to look like and I look to her in the same way my daughters will look to me. No matter how many spreads of Kate Moss I plastered to my ceiling in high school, the woman I saw in the flesh most of all was my mother. Regardless of how many airbrushed advertisements are plastered over my daughters' psyches, my body is the one they see in front of them every day. In the flesh. Scarred and badly tattooed, with sagging navel and upper arms that triple in size when I press them against my sides.

1. 

Bo and Revi don't start preschool until next summer which in this moment feels like a lifetime away. And that's because it is. Life is long. It's so long I can count it in decades.

2. 

Life is short. It's so short I can count it in months. 

1. 

When people say "youth is wasted on the young" I think of caterpillars.

2. 

When people say "fight the effects of aging" I think of butterflies.

1. 

And I smile.

2. 

As the lines continue to draw themselves with their pencils. 

1. 

Time is an architect.

2. 

And I'd rather live in an old and storied house.  

GGC