Is time a ramp, or a stair?
Thoughts on daycare, time, and the soul
This installment of my “Pump & Dump” series is in honor of my nephew’s first week of daycare. Hooray, little S!
Childcare: what a bear. Expensive, competitive, scarce, confusing—I could write for days about how absurdly last-century and inadequate America’s support infrastructure is for this-century’s parents. But let’s skip the discussion of finding it, for now, and go to the part nearly everyone (upwards of 80%) reaches at some point: the day you put your human in someone else’s hands and walk away.
It comes so fast! It could be because sleeplessness makes weeks of time feel like one unbroken day. But I also think it’s because time — it turns out —is continuous, when I expected to experience it as stepped.
I imagined having a child with the same framework in which I remember my own childhood: being in kindergarten; then Grade 1; then grade 2 … Each a finite stage, with first days and last days, and visible changes, marked by first day of school photos and back-to-school Trapper-Keeper shopping.
We think of baby milestones as steps on a staircase: They crawl! They walk! A tooth! A word! I imagined each took up its own space in the calendar. But no. It’s total spacetime chaos. It’s an MC Escher of staircases as verbal and motor skills take turns advancing and stalling.
Each milestone is just a rock you rush past as you slalom through the whitewater rapids of time.
Our tiny dumpling’s growth, like a pumpkin in the garden, is every day. It’s invisible yet rapid. You can’t see it during the day, but you wake up and know that it’s happened. Impossibly, the fingernail-sized seed stretches into a vine across your whole yard in the span of a few months.
In the magical thinking of my brain, despite having taken science courses and living on earth and knowing people with babies and children, I somehow thought I’d be mothering a baby for … I don’t know … a couple years? The idea of BABY is so big, it feels like something that must take four years to get through, like a bachelors degree.
But the truth is, for all the movies and sitcoms and commercials that make BABY seem ~so big~, we’re basically talking about a one-year lease on an apartment! Then you get kicked out and have to find yourself a TODDLER.
The truth is, you get a baby for about twelve months. Some people less, others more.
And I imagined that I would “have a one-year-old” for one year! And while technically true, experientially, no! As soon as she turned 1, she didn’t stay at that insanely adorable size and skill-set. The imp had the nerve to keep growing. You can’t even hold on to 1. You can’t hold on to any of it, it slips like sand through your fingers.
Crawling? Not for long. An adorably unstable new walker? Not for long.
It’s not enough time to experience and process what you’re experiencing as a parent.
My baby ticks ever closer to four. It’s months away, but I already see it. Little flower-sepals of babydom keep falling away, and new skills and sophistication unfurl.
This is all to say that a) their transitions toward independence seem so shockingly sudden and b) the recent past seems shockingly far away. When I think about starting daycare now, I think, How could I have parted with that tiny, vulnerable, helpless baby?
And though she was tiny and sensitive, she was not at all helpless, and she was quite resilient! (All babies generally are, I’m told.) And parenting forces us to be pretty resilient too.
On the first day of daycare, my daughter wept when I left. And on the second, and third, and fourth, and every day. The faster I left, the less dramatic the scene, but the more cruel it felt.
The first day (and some others) I stood in the hallway listening to her cries. Everything inside me constricted.
When I heard her quiet down, I crept toward the door and very carefully peeked through its window. She sat in a tiny wooden chair at a low rectangular wooden table with five other toddlers, a miniature staff meeting. The toddlers picked at the pale yellow cereal puffs before them.
I got in the car and drove away. But I couldn’t go far, because what if she needed me to rescue her? I stayed close, waiting for a phone call. I pulled into a lot near some tennis courts at a nearby park. After an hour, I made it to a bookstore.
Here’s what I recorded on that day:
I’m on the barstool at the bookstore downtown, wearing my messy maternity overalls, a decaf latte by my side. Modest Mouse is on the stereo, soothing and exacerbating my sore-feeling heart, like a too-deep massage.
I’ve just dropped you off at daycare, and I want to weep. You wept, that particular cry where your mouth is open into a boxy shape, not the oval of a scream, but the square of a guttural howl, and I can see the blocky teeth at the back of your tiny jaw. I know you want to play with kids and explore. I know this will be good for you — won’t it? — to be in this social environment, and with other adults, and independent from me, just a little.
But when we arrived, the other girl with your name was crying and crying, and it made another one cry. And I heard the teacher say It’s okay, you’re okay, and I wanted to tell her she should validate the poor little kiddo’s feelings, and I didn’t want her to “you’re okay” you. And Emilia offered you some rubber chips from the playground and showed you how she was eating them, and no adult but me could see that. And the little rubber-chip-covered yard seemed sad and damp.
Inside another classroom, older kids were playing with dough and scooping beans at a sensory table, and I wanted that for you. But I suppose I also want you to able to handle parts of the world that are less than gloriously picturesque, less than aesthetic! Maybe it isn’t sad in your eyes, maybe it’s intriguing, thrillingly unfamiliar, a pirate’s lair, a children’s world, with its plastic play structures and random, sun-bleached balls and faded plastic trucks. Eight of your peers and only two adults.
The awful thing was having to trust the world to understand the preciousness, the unfathomable magic of the tiny human I’d given it, who looked as regular as any other, but like any other, was made of stardust and spirit and quantum physics and anything leftover after that that might be what we mean by the idea of God.
The awful thing was the beginning of a private life, her life without me. Maybe she’d hear songs—wonderful or terrible—that I wouldn’t know, and one day thirteen years in the future she’d hear it again and say, “Oh yeah, remember that?” And I wouldn’t remember.
As a baby’s parent, you’re the driver, the tour guide. You pick the route, the sights to see along the way, the soundtrack, the speed, the temperature, the carseat, the snacks—you get it. You make the world. You’re driving, you’re in control. You move them, you dress them. They see whatever you show them.
They get a little bigger and can move themselves, express preferences, make choices. Maybe in those moments, you’re the backseat passenger, peering over their shoulder and learning about their personality, following their gaze to understand their world. You’re down on the floor for tummy time, and you realize how gigantic a lamp is from that perspective.
Then you drop them off at daycare, and you’re not in the car at all.
If you’re lucky, you get pictures from a daycare-app … and then you’re really forced to contend with the fact that this baby also exists without you! Your own object-permanence epiphany.
I’ve heard it said that raising kids is really a process of small goodbyes. (Who would tell you this ahead of time—what a nightmarish proposition!) But so far, it’s also a series of hellos. Because along with that private, separate self they are developing apart from us, they’re becoming who they are becoming, and we get to see that person and know that person more deeply than anyone else does. We hold the entirety of their life in our hearts and memories. From their very first step into time.
Beautifully expressed! It’s so helpful to hear insights from parents further in the journey to get an inkling of what’s in store and hopefully be as present for it as possible.
Lovely!