Chapter 15

15

Time goes by so quickly. Enjoy every moment.

Mothers speak of time like it’s the only currency we know.

Can you believe it? Can you believe she’s already six months old?Other women would say this to me, nearly chipper, idling their strollers back and forth on the sidewalk as their babies slept under expensive, gauzy white blankets, their pacifiers bobbing. I would look down at Violet, staring up at me from where she lay, her fists waving, her legs stiff, wanting, wanting, wanting. And I would wonder how we’d made it so far. Six whole months. It felt like six years.

It’s the best job in the world, isn’t it? Motherhood?This was what the doctor said at one of Violet’s appointments for her shots. She was a mother of three. I told her about my recurring hemorrhoids the size of grapes, about how long it had been since we’d had sex, since I’d even thought of your penis in passing. Her eyebrows lifted with her smile—Yup. I get it. I really do. As though I were a part of the club now, privy to its unspoken truths. What I couldn’t tell her was that I felt I’d aged a century since I’d given birth to Violet. That she seemed to stretch every hour we spent together. That the months had crawled by so slowly I’d often splash cold water on my face during the day to see if I was just dreaming—if that’s why time never made any sense to me.

It’s like you blink, and they’re suddenly such big girls. They become these sweet little people right before your eyes. Violet seemed to grow so slowly. I never noticed a change in her until you shook it in front of my face. You would tell me her clothes were too small, that her belly was hanging below her shirts, that her leggings came up almost to her knees. You would pack away her baby toys and buy her things on your way home from work that blinked and beeped, things for tiny humans who are developing, learning, thinking. I was just trying to keep her alive. I was focused on her eating and her sleeping and the probiotic drops that I could never seem to remember. I was focused on getting through the days as they rolled like boulders into one another.