It seems only yesterday that I was at the hospital screaming my head off as my first son battled his way out of my womb. Well, actually he was a breech baby so the hospital, in it’s wisdom, decided it best for all that I had a C-section, so in fact he was yanked out of my lower abdomen, but not before he’d given me a good beating from the inside.
Anyhow the point I’m trying to make is that said son is now almost four years old and I cant quite believe it. I know it’s been said many times and it’s one of those phrases that every older person and her mother says when you’re pushing around a newborn, “Oh they grow up so quickly.” You nod and smile sweetly and send them on their way, muttering under your breath at the ridiculous notion that there is some sort of time warp which will plummet you into the next twenty years at the bat of an eyelid. But, before you know it you are eating your mutterings because the little darling is approaching his fourth birthday. You are left wondering where on earth those four years have gone. Of course you know that time hasn’t sped up, it certainly doesn’t feel any different when you’re in the moment. You’ve not missed out months of your life, you’d know about it surely, and you have the psychological scars and the photos to prove you’ve endured/enjoyed every single moment of their development – teething, tantrums, toilet training and all!
There must be a scientific explanation for the anomaly in the time space continuum but ill be darned if I know what it is or, come to think of it, could even begin to understand it.
Of course it’s not just my offspring that are growing and developing super fast but I myself seem to have aged unnaturally speedily too, with not much to show for the last four years other than a rapidly growing fractious four year old, going on teenager, and another little cherub who has arrived at some point in the intervening years and who is also developing at a similar speed of knots.
So why does it happen? Is this phenomenon confined to those of us raising children or are we all subject to this strange time fast forward? Has it always been so or is there some kind of conspiracy going on upstairs that we are not party to?
I read once, don’t ask me where because my ageing brain forgets the details, that time seems to progress more quickly when we do the same things every day. This could explain it I suppose, I guess that on the face of it our routine is a bit samey. But my days change in other ways. Each morning I face a new challenge that my boys present to me.
Perhaps it’s to do with my age. Perhaps we reach a certain age, when having done all the procreating that we’re going to do, our brains speed us on to the ends of our lives so the world can soon be rid of us to make room for the new generation of procreators – what a cheery thought! But how can it be that a mother and child can share the same space and time yet time passes more quickly for the mother than it does for the child? (I remember those days when as a child my days would just drag by, moment by agonising moment, especially the days leading up to the summer holidays or Christmas.)
There is a fundamental rule against all this surely? It just doesn’t make sense and, to be honest, my brain hurts just thinking about it.