The age-old dilemma has been solved: it turns out there actually ARE more hours in the day. They just all occur before I want to wake up.

This is what happens when children arrive, as they shift priorities and schedules and overhaul lives from the cosmetic level to the fundamental: everything changes. If, for example, you’re not a morning person (or a morning-night-middle of the night person, during the newborn weeks)? Well, good luck to you, sir. If, mayhap, you prefer to wear clothing unsoiled by spit-up or diarrhea debris? Have fun with your new wardrobe, then. If, like me, you left the South to identify with the breakneck pace of life that embodies New York City and never reset that pace when you arrived back in the land of flows-like-molasses?

Expect to have it reset for you. Expect, in fact, for all of your perspective to be reset. (“You’re welcome,” I imagine The Kid saying right now, from his bouncy seat at daycare as the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack plays in the background like it did when I dropped him off this morning. “You’re welcome.“)

I’ve always been obsessive about time. It kind of matches the way I’m obsessive about absolutely everything else. For me, being on time means being five minutes early. For The Husband, it means getting there. So when we drive anywhere together, I’m either gritting my teeth and clenching my fists, or he’s saying that we’re too early and we should stop by Starbucks. When TK was born, I put him on a schedule immediately. “What a surprise,” said no one, ever. At lunch today, my friend and I laughed over our similarities in this arena and the stress it caused when the schedule was not heeded. “The baby hasn’t read your book,” her mother told her at the time, and how true that statement is. In fact, babies and children don’t read ANY of our books. Rude!

Whether because of his Schedule Nazi or his own temperament (the truth is surely somewhere between the two but I tell TH, hopefully, that it was probably mostly us), TK has been a wonderful sleeper. Mostly. The other night, though, in the middle of his solid twelve hours, he woke up at 2 am screaming. He wouldn’t be calmed by himself or my back pats, so I rebelliously picked him up, wiped his tears, and rocked him. TH waited beside us supportively (because he’s a good man and oh, also? not just a sperm donor) and we put TK down a few minutes later. He grinned at us and rolled promptly over, falling asleep mid-turn. An hour later, I did the same.

Yesterday afternoon, I propped my tired feet up on the coffee table as TK bounced in his exersaucer. He glanced back at me every few seconds, grinning when I caught his eye, then began doing that thing where he checks his hands out: holding them an inch from his face, his brow furrowed, gazing at them as if they’re the most amazing and beautiful work of art ever to exist.

And I now know the truth: they are.

Because, whether I’m counting the hours until I have to wake up, or until we put him to bed, or until I get to pick him up from school, I’m always doing math. And he–he’s always looking around in wonder. He has slowed down time for me, exposed me to parts of the day I only used to know in dreams or bars. Now they’re filled with seconds, some painstaking and some glorious, all weighed down by his presence. In the early days, that presence felt, at times, more than I was equipped to handle. Now? We sit in the sunroom and he turns to me with that grin and my eyes well not with tears of despair but of pure, unmasked joy that rivals his. And I think: I never even lived until it was the three of us.

This morning I placed him in the high chair and turned around for one last look before my exit. “Say you’ll share with me one love, one lifetime…let me lead you from your solitude,” the voices sang in the background–hilariously, I thought, in a room populated by babies. Then I remembered hearing them on Broadway with TH beside me, and how the romantic earnestness of it stirred the cynic right out of me. I looked up at TK and he was doing that lopsided grin right at me and my throat thickened. I walked out reluctantly and began the countdown to our reunion.