The boys have taken to an expression lately: “when I was a baby.” You know, once they utter this, that whatever comes next is going to be at best revisionist history and, most likely, complete BS. Recent examples:
“When I was a baby, I didn’t have watches.”
“When I was a baby, I didn’t like Transformers.”
“When I was a baby, I couldn’t run fast.”
Okay, so these things are all true, but as the boys tell them, they’re meant to convey how far they’ve come. “Baby,” of course, is a term meaning anything they want it to: last year, or before they were even born. It’s history, is what I’m saying, and they’re the ones writing it based on what they know now.
Meanwhile, I look back with my somewhat faulty yet still more complete memory and can see a sweeping vista of both change and sameness.
Mine might go like this:
“When I was a baby, I moved to New York and finally grew up. And met your dad.”
“When I was a baby, I didn’t know how to stand up for myself so I let people walk all over me. Now I have BOUNDARIES. And swearing.”
“When I was a baby, I could stay awake until 4 am and not be hungover the next day.”
“When I was a baby, I voted straight-ticket Republican and thought I couldn’t be safe without a gun.”
“When I was a baby, I thought that everything–including people–was either one of two things: black or white, right or wrong–and didn’t let anything transcend that.”
Last week, the second and final of school holidays before summer, the four of us flew to Tasmania. Hobart, specifically, and as we walked around its streets and gazed upon the sea, I thought about how a few years ago–when I was a baby–if you had told me I’d spend the better part of a week exploring this island off continental Australia, I would have asked for a paper bag in which to hyperventilate. (I didn’t even know until way too recently that Tasmania is actually an Australian state.)
But there we were, even deeper into the Southern hemisphere than usual, ambling around cobblestone streets and alleyways, exploring shut-down prisons and insane asylums, boating to museums, driving up mountains, and ferrying in our car to an even smaller island to eat cheese and drink beer. We have been evacuated/ejected/moved/sent to corners of the world we didn’t even know existed back when we were babies, and there is something devastatingly wonderful about all this. How easily it could have been avoided, rejected, missed. How beautiful that it wasn’t.
On that island, after a lunch of cheese, bread, and more cheese, we drove to what they call the island’s neck. Our family has a deep familiarity with necks, so it felt only fitting that we pulled the car over here and looked around at a spot, the thinnest on the island, where on one side were the calm, smooth waters of a bay and on the other, the churning, slapping waves of the Tasman Sea. An array of colours, all within the blue-green range yet more than that, one side sparkling and the other frothing. Stuck between two totally different yet somehow similar places.
I don’t know, seemed apropos.
Later we celebrated The Husband’s birthday and Facebook sent me a video of our friendship, going back to when we were babies, and on to now: now, living on a huge island in the South Pacific, between homes in more ways than one, with two kids who are so different and so similar. Then, and now, with now always turning into then to be replaced by another now. And amidst it all, the wish that we’d uttered to each other–to someday live near the water–turning into a prayer so laughably and abundantly answered that there are oceans on all sides of us, all leading to this moment on a neck surrounded by water that, as I write this, is now a then.
And I look outside and still see water now.
It occurs to me that I’m quite awful at being in the Now, and that meditation is supposed to help this but I’m shit at that too, but that over the past few days I’ve woken before even the kids (thank you, weighted blanket) and haven’t pushed the wakefulness away like I did in that Tasmanian hotel bed but instead have embraced it, lying there in prayer and meditation and, hopefully, the Now. The moments that I complain are fleeting are that at least partially because I truncate them myself in search of the next one, always moving to get past rather than seeking to stay. To look around. To take in.
When I was a baby, I hardly ever did that. But now…and Now, I’d like to be here and try. Because Now feels holy.