It’s been months.
Funny thing is, I wouldn’t have even known, except that a friend mentioned my blog and for the first time in a while, I took a look at it.
Time is flying.
And also, time is frozen.
I don’t know if that really explains it, but really that explains it.
— § —
One way to understand the job of parenthood—or rather, one way to live it intentionally—is as a matter of stopping time.
To be a parent is to stop time for a time. Time the brutal, time the destroyer. Time is loss; time is pain; time is mortality; time is human frailty.
As a parent, you first job is to protect your child from threats until they are old enough to survive on their own.
The first, last, and largest threat that any human faces—is time.
— § —
Of course, one can’t stop time worldwide, or even in one’s own life, but it is just possible to create a little bubble of semi-timelessness, of Lesser Time, around your children. To hold back some of its tidal, elemental, world-shattering force and instead limit it to a trickle for a few years.
Just how long this needs to be done isn’t really clear; it’s a sort of instinctive judgment that you make based on what you know of your children. In practice, I think most always it needs to be at least the first decade. Then, you can let just a little bit more through, and more and more each year, until sometime in their teenage years, you can finally let go.
And then, they will face the full torrent that is time, hopefully grown enough, and prepared enough by you, not to be swallowed up immediately.
— § —
This is no small task, however.
To hold back time, even just most of time, requires all of your resources as an individual. Emotional resources, intellectual resources, physical resources, financial resources… To be successful, you must dedicate your whole self, use everything that you have.
— § —
I am almost there. I am beginning, finally, to sense the time of time’s return coming. Even as an adult, it is overwhelming to think of the letting-go of the holding-back, of seeing time at full force again, washing over you and over your children—in their case, for the first time.
It is like living aside the caldera and knowing that the eruption is coming.
Because it is coming. It is simply impossible to hold off time forever. No one has enough resources to keep it up for long; a decade or more is already nearly equivalent to destruction.
— § —
And indeed, I am very aware of the dwindling of my resources.
Emotional, intellectual, physical, financial. It is, at this point, a game of holding on as long as I possibly can, trying to stretch myself, to try not to break before time’s time is come, a time that is still not here, but a few short years out.
Things are not what they were.
And they will be worse still.
But by god, there is a chance that we might just make it.
And everything after will be after.