Passing Time
featured image | Annette
The silent dark is broken by the padding of feet, drawing me slowly out of the depths of dreaming. The bedroom door opens a fraction, letting in a thin rectangle of light, then closes, drawing out the light once again. Something else has slipped in with the light. I strain my ears, listening for clues, but there’s only a sixth sense of another presence. Then comes a sigh, softer than the gentlest breeze, and a small sleepy body slips in beside me. Inside the covers, a cold foot presses on my belly.
On winter mornings the darkness lingers. I expect my children to wake with the light, later each morning, until the solstice, but that isn’t what happens. Instead they wake early, 6am, 5am, sometimes even 4am, and shuffle around the house in the cold, waiting for the sun, expecting breakfast and stories and warm fires from me. Every winter I tell them they mustn’t wake so early. Tell them it isn’t fair. Tell them I won’t. But I always do.
They try. For minutes at a time they hold back their restless energy and lie in bed, searching their senses for morning clues. They listen for the stillness before dawn, the distant rush of cars, birds stirring, a change in the feel of things. . . They listen until the exquisite pain of anticipation propels them out of bed and into the new day.
This morning though, I am given a reprieve. My son’s breath is steady, his mouth open, sleep has claimed him once again. It’s still dark and will be for hours yet. But I’m awake now and restless. I need the toilet. My arm is going numb where his head lies, cutting off my circulation. For a moment I wonder about that, how much heavier we become in sleep. How much there is inside our heads. How much we don’t use. I think about weight too, how there are different kinds of weight. The sort we measure on a scale, and the other sort. The heaviness that some people carry around them – their shadows filled with the past. I’m restless, but I’m putting off the inevitable. Whoever heard of waking a sleeping child? My oldest daughter cries out and I tense, but it’s quiet again. A passing fear.
There’s nothing heavy about my children, no shadows weighing them down, and I wish I could always keep it this way. I wish I could ward off the troubles of life, but we all have our own journeys to make. As Kahlil Gibran wrote so beautifully in The Prophet, ‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. . . You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth…’
I am the bow, but not the archer. I’m not the maker of a destiny but the enabler. And what a responsibility that is. To be stable and strong for them. To give my children gladness, to teach them empathy and compassion and confidence. To show them how to find their way into the flow of life. To help them become truly human.
Or is it my children who are teaching me what I need to know? In so many ways they’re already wiser than me. I tell time by my children, counting the moments I still have. They tell time by embracing life. Days, months, years, slip through my fingers, while they fill each moment with themselves. I reach back into the past, strain forward into the future. They live in the now. Naturally. Easily. The way all wisdom traditions tell us we should.
I’m lying here awake, feeling the weight of my own shadows, my mind flitting from one thought to the next. I plan dinner, write a shopping list in my head, worry about the bills, panic about outfits for the school fancy dress ball, nudge my husband until he stops snoring and feel guilty because I’m not up already, using this rare solitary time for something more useful. But what sweet comfort, to be sandwiched gently between my husband and my son on this cold morning, feeling my son’s breath warm upon my cheek. How could I possibly regret anything so precious?
It’s no good though, my arm is hurting and I have to move it. I try to do this gently, hoping I can slip it out from under my son’s head without disturbing him. But he wakes and smiles at me, a face so clear I can see it in the almost dark.
‘Best mum,’ he says.
Then.
‘Mummy, let’s talk about mysteries.’
He’s sitting up, eyes bright, mind spinning with possibilities and I’m amazed at how smooth his transition is between sleeping and waking. I’m slow, dragging myself out of unconsciousness, grasping uselessly at my dreams which slip effortlessly away, tantalisingly out of reach. My brain stays fuddled, but he’s bright. He’s here. Now. And I want him to always be like that.
‘Mysteries?’
‘You know. . . Infinite space, imaginary numbers . . . What’s underneath a whirlpool? Inside a blackhole?
I think about blackholes. How scary they sound, the way they absorb energy, their appetite insatiable. Humanity is like that, sucking up the earth’s energy. There are individuals too, who deplete others of their life energy, sucking, sucking, trying to fill the empty space inside themselves. The more they suck the hungrier they are, that’s the irony of it. But for every vampire there is someone who radiates positive energy. Someone to whom others gravitate.
‘Mum,’ says my son, nudging me.
‘Most galaxies,’ I tell him, ‘have a supermassive black hole in their centre, a bit like a giant plug hole. Some of them are as big as billions of suns put together.’
His eyes are wide with wonder.
‘Is that as big as infinity?’ he asks.
‘No, infinity is bigger than anything.’
‘Like families,’ he says.
‘Families?’ I ask, puzzled, then wait while he thinks, loving the little furrow on his forehead and the faraway look in his eyes.
‘The way they go on forever, both ways. . . grandma and great grandma and us.’ He takes a breath. ‘And then we’ll have kids. . . and so will they. . .’
Slowly it’s dawning on me, the beautiful thing that my son has achieved. He’s connected space and time with infinity.
‘Yes!’ I say. ‘Yes, that’s exactly it.’
I clamour about in my memory for more wonders to feed my insatiable son.
‘As the stars and planets get closer to a blackhole they speed up, faster and faster, and time speeds up too, until a year is only twenty or thirty days. Imagine that, you’d have a birthday every few weeks.’
He laughs out loud at this but I can see his mind at work, calculating the present potential.
‘And there’s a theory that these supermassive black holes shoot out jets of matter, sometimes millions of light years long.’
‘Why?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps they throw up the bits they don’t want. Or maybe they recycle all the old negative energy and spit out fresh clean matter. Isn’t that a lovely thought.’
My son is quiet, he’s storing it, a special sweet to savour. He’ll want more, but I’ve reached the limits of my black hole knowledge and my daughters are waking. The stillness is being taken over by activity: lights flicking on and off, the toilet flushing, someone blowing their nose. It’s time to get up. Reluctantly I leave the warmth of my bed for the shock of a cold toilet seat. Then fumble about in the dark looking for slippers, woolly socks and a jacket. The chores are about to begin: breakfast, packed lunches, teeth, faces, clean undies, shoe laces. . . But first there’s the frosty trip outside for wood, the grass frozen solid, crunching under my feet, as I breathe steamy dragon breaths and ignore my shivering for long enough to stand staring up at the Milky Way, wondering at the universe once again after all these years of forgetting. . .
Another gift from my children.
All day
I hold them close.
