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The Time of Our Lives
By Tom Montgomery-Fate
Issue 92, January/February 1999

Rushing forward, you leave your children behind. Stopping, you find them.

This morning I watched Abby, our 18-month-old daughter, limp up a mountain of books piled next to the sofa. She was coughing and inadvertently smearing thick, yellow mucus on her cheeks. She has a cold. She is teething. Her sharp back molars are cutting through soft pink gums. The previous night she dropped a ceramic dinner plate perpendicularly on her big toe. The plate wasn’t damaged, but her toe was. Blood, rushing to the point of impact, created a tender, swollen, black-and-blue "owie."

I was amazed at how little any of that seemed to matter to her. She used the book pile as a makeshift step, a wooden book rack as another, and somehow finally swung her thick leg over the sofa’s armrest, rolling on to the cushion beside me. Delighted with her accomplishment, her determined eyes filled with joy and brought me out of my workaday preoccupation to her place – laughter.

Satisfied, she rolled back onto the floor and began to bathe her baby doll in a blue Tupperware bowl.

Given, we’ve had some long nights with teething and coughing, but that morning it was clear that Abby’s physical ailments were far secondary to her desire to explore, to participate in the moment, in unfolding wonder. Abby, like most toddlers, lives in the fullness of time.

I seldom do. And as I stuffed my briefcase with books, pens, notepads, and folders, and filled my plastic mug with strong coffee, and listened to the traffic update, I watched her, and wondered when she, too, would begin to unlearn living in the present tense. How long until I and others would begin to teach her a delusion – that time, and thus life, can and should be meticulously compartmentalized and managed?

The birth of both of my daughters taught me how inherently unmanageable meaningful time can be. Their births both marked time and initiated a new sense of timelessness in my life. The profound meaning of my memories of their births does not lie in the numerical "point in time" (in Greek, chronos) of each birth. Rather, it lies in the concurrent time expressed by the Greek word kairos – that immeasurable, uncontrollable, timeless moment which has never before occurred and will never occur again. It is a moment of unparalleled opportunity for meaning, for beauty, a quintessentially present moment, a moment that somehow initiates both the being of our babies and of ourselves as parents.

From my position as observer/supporter, birth seemed to be a sacred moment of simultaneous physical separation and powerful spiritual reconnection between mother and daughter, a creative rather than productive moment.

But now my daughters, Tessa and Abby, are three and one, and I’m trying to remember the lessons they and their mother taught me in their shared act of birth. In the last few years I have lost much of the kairos sense of time that a child’s birth teaches. I have to admit that sometimes I see my children as anchors, which are forever tied to my life, for both good and ill. At times they are my spiritual and moral foundation, faithfully holding me upright through the stormiest of seas, teaching me how to live a five-sensed life, refusing to cut me loose despite my flaws. But during my more selfish moments, they can seem like a heavy weight that prevents me from moving toward the fulfillment of personal goals.

On these hectic, overscheduled days, I feel an intense desire to somehow get control of our frenetic lives. But when I yield to the delusion of time "management," I soon discover that multi-tasking simply leads to multi-being, to both emotional and intellectual fragmentation.

I am beginning to understand that while I can’t make time for my children, they can sometimes "make" it for me. If I watch and listen carefully, they will teach me how to slow down enough to discern the limits of my auto-piloted life. When Tessa and Abby kneel wide-eyed on the sidewalk over an anthill, or chase lightning bugs in the cool lull between dusk and dark, or quietly monitor a robin sitting on its eggs in the crook of an elm tree, they create a new vision of time for me.

Children ask, and remind us to ask, "What are our hands for?" They fingerpaint. They squeeze cold oatmeal between their fingers at breakfast. They rub marinara sauce in their hair and eyebrows at dinner and don’t care if it dries into cement. They know parents can be bread makers as well as breadwinners. They remind us that the lingering smell of warm dough rising on the kitchen table is not a romanticized image from a bygone era, but represents one of a thousand choices that parents perpetually make between time and money. Because they have not yet unlearned the wonders of their senses, nor the sacred efficiency of the natural world, children can teach us how to remember lives that are rooted in connectedness, in relationship.

Recently, in a moment of weakness, I let my daughter watch an episode of Arthur (a children’s show on PBS) while I cleaned the kitchen. During that 30-minute show one of the characters announced, "I’m bored." Tessa repeated the phrase every hour or so for the rest of the day, not knowing what it meant. I felt the same frustration I do when my writing students respond to an essay, or poem, or to life with that convenient one-word solution to a complex world: "Whatever." How does one define boredom to a three year old? I wanted to say it was laziness, or the opposite of paying attention, the opposite of response-ability. I wanted to quote Walt Whitman, "Boredom is simply the emotional underside of insensitivity." I thought of the alarming number of children who are now diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and take Ritalin daily. I thought of a line from Simone Weil’s wonderful autobiography: "Attentiveness without an aim is the supreme form of prayer." But finally, I simply said boredom was "bad," and that when we were bored we were often tired. She asked me if I was ever bored. I said I was. She asked me if I was ever tired. I said I was.

Then I asked her if she wanted to go to the kitchen and get her watercolors. She did. She pulled out her art box, fished out the long, plastic, yellow case, snapped it open, and squirted in some water. The oval cakes of pigment softened into puddles of color. Carefully, she tore off one piece of paper for me an d another for her. I put on some water for tea and opened all the windows. Soon a humming mower, a twittering wren on the electric line, the rubber thump of a basketball on concrete, the scent of cut grass, and my own childhood came drifting in through the screens. We rubbed and swished our brushes in the raw greens and reds and blues and made great timeless swirls leading nowhere.

Tom Montgomery-Fate teaches writing and literature at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. His most recent book is Beyond the White Noise (Chalice Press, 1997).