Growth

I happened across this photography project by Annie Wang on Instagram, and I find it so moving:

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At the first level, the progress of the photographs captures in a concentrated way the velocity of a child’s growth, how strange it is to have an encapsulated life unfold entirely in the middle of your own, how they begin and then leave you in such a blink of time, and how the compounding years eclipse the long moments of babyhood. Although Edith is not yet two, I already feel this. Her babyhood felt like epochs unfolding as it happened but already it is a tiny speck in the past; I can hardly recall it. I look at baby pictures of her from less than a year ago and feel a great sense of longing for her, even though she’s still here in front of me. Time becomes something altogether illogical when you are a parent; it expands and leaps and compresses in disorienting ways.

But the other thing that is so interesting to me about this photo series is the way in which it depicts how motherhood erases and then remakes you. In the first series, there is nothing in the pictures but Wang and her son. There is no time for anything else, he is all-consuming and her life has been packed away elsewhere. Her days are sparse, her appearance low maintenance, her personality has been tacked somewhere out of the way, to be retrieved when he needs her less. And then with each year, while her son grows and develops interests and his life expands and colors, she is there in the background also growing back into herself. We see her with evidence of gradually more interests and obligations, her appearance becomes more intentional and varied.

This has been a surprising and not unwelcome aspect of motherhood for me — that in giving birth to a baby, you are forced to undergo a sort of rebirth yourself, or at least a reset or a remaking. Throughout my first 40 years of life, I often wanted to fundamentally change myself or my life in some way, but I was never able to truly; I would try to jolt myself out of my familiar patterns, but I’d settle back into them eventually. But having a baby forces you into an utterly new world, irrevocably and absolutely, and quite overnight. You go into the hospital one person, and you come out another. And for a year, I had no idea who I was, other than the person who was keeping Edith alive. There was no time for any of my old habits or routines, my familiar thinking patterns, my coping mechanisms, my old obsessions. And my brain was swept utterly bare of any preoccupation other than my daughter. And gradually, as she becomes more independent by fragments I have a bit of space again and the interesting thing about this is that my priorities have permanently shifted. I value time more, I procrastinate less. Anxieties and concerns that preoccupied me for 40 years seem laughably irrelevant now. My values haven’t so much changed as that I am able, finally, to honor them. I am a better, more intentional person than I used to be, and a more genuinely happy one.

I don’t yet have much free time and I won’t for years, but I imagine that when I do, the way I choose to spend it will be utterly different than in the years before Edith. Time is more valuable both because I have less of it, and also because I am aware on a much deeper level of its brevity.

For over a year now, when Edith finishes her dinner, I pick her up and shake her over her high chair, and then I heft her up backwards over the top of my head, and carry her to her bath. She loves this and giggles and kicks, and if there are other people at the table, she waves goodbye elaborately while upside down. We’ve done this every single night since she was….six months? Seven? Lately, she’s been so heavy it’s a real strain to do this, and I was worried about the day she would be too heavy for me to lift. But then three nights ago, when I went to heft her over my head, she said “no, down!” I thought I must have misheard, or maybe she didn’t know what she wanted, so I carried on, and she shouted, and said “down!!!” again. I put her down and she ran to the bath on her own two feet. I thought maybe this was a weird anomaly, but she did it again the next night, and the night after and it took that long for me to finally get it.

I’ll be quicker on the uptake for the next one.