Time
I never felt that time, to me, resembled a father… every moment in the present is the womb holding life, so to me time is more mother than anything I’ve ever known.
—Ocean Vuong*
Time, like God, is a mystery, both constant and on the move. We live by it and within it. But like everything mystical in human hands, it becomes fashioned into something rote—a rule, a tool, for condemnation, rather than a gift at which to wonder.
My mother, like many people I love, seems to reside in some metaphysical community of minds situated far, far, outside of time—at least as the concept has been communicated to me. I’m a metronome person, painfully aware of the passing of each moment, a persistent tick, tick, ticking in the background of brain and body. The metronome does not reside in my mother.
She shows up to events when it makes sense for her. Sometimes she knows that she is an hour late; other times, she is certain that it’s more like ten minutes tops. When questioned about her delay to family dinners or church picnics, or, say, the airport, she often replies with breathy disregard, “I was just piddling.”
I wouldn’t say I am a particularly angry person. I do not enjoy the feeling as some claim to. I don’t rush toward it as emotional refuge or pat myself on the back for having performed it, but growing up, to whatever degree I let my rage flourish, I did so most often in the garden of maternal relations. And so, like many children who have a tardy parent, I learned to lie to my mother to save us from the certain death and destruction that would have otherwise befallen us.
If I needed to be somewhere at 2:00, I told her it was 1:30. If I needed her to be somewhere to watch me—a play, a competition, an awards ceremony—I’d arrange for someone else to pick her up and get them to say that they needed to arrive early. In addition to these schemes, when particularly important events were forthcoming, I snuck into various rooms of the house resetting clocks and watches five-ten-fifteen minutes later than the existing delay she had instituted in her own attempts to arrive more aligned with the rest of the world. I don’t feel bad about my deception.
It was passive,
it was aggressive,
it was effective.
There is something very satisfying about manipulating the hands of an old-timey clock—
feeling the resistance as you rush them along, savoring the power of shifting reality. For many years, I thought human relationship to time was a binary one—there were those of us who were right and those of us who were rude. I, myself, preferred to be in the right. But now, as an adult, I wonder, am I actually, by my very nature, in tune with the passing of seconds, minutes, and hours or am I, myself, an old grandmother clock fashioned and coerced to be a timekeeper by the clock-makers hell-bent on keeping me in line? Do my hands follow the rhythm at the core of who I am, or are they moved, at times, by an external interloper?
The year I started Kindergarten, my mother picked me up every day on her lunch break from one of her multiple concurrent nursing jobs. She had waited too long to get me registered for the morning class at Central Elementary, so now, during her thirty-minute respite from caring for older adults, she made the frantic trip to retrieve me from the babysitter, drop me at my classroom by noon, and race back to give some awaiting elder their afternoon medications. I used to focus on the frenzy in this story. These days I try to turn my attention to the faithfulness.
Time is a privilege afforded to those with enough food, and money, and opportunity to go around—
and around—
to dwell in one place or moment long enough, to make a plan, and then to be
uninterrupted enough to follow through with it.
To the extent that I have been able to be punctual throughout my life, that feat might say less about my piety and more about my positionality –piles of educational, economic, and situational freedom, forming reserves that I have mined as I have had need or desire. My mother had 4 kids, 2.5 jobs, family-of-origin obligations, and even some of her own interests and desires, I presume. She chose not to add “impressing powers that be” to her daily agenda. She did not have time for such foolishness.
When I was in my final semester of college, I took a Life and Teachings of Jesus course. The professor told us that the messiah was a “God of interruptions,” pausing often from what was regularly scheduled on account of being moved by a person or a place. I liked that about Jesus, but I wasn’t sure I had the luxury of such divine abandon. For me, time has been a commodity, one of the precious few things I could ply into submission—planning my life, beat by beat (beating by beating?), and grieving each time it became clear that most of that control was an illusion. I won’t pretend that I am cured of the desire to hold it in my hands like a lusty child holds a little creature, which is to say, with a clumsy dominion. I won’t suggest that I am ready to renounce my calendar to go and follow my bliss, but I can see now that my mother might have some things to teach me about letting go.
Time,
like fashion,
like hair
like food,
like language,
and volume, and soul
expands or diminishes as it is given permission.
A few years ago, I began a new dream job as a professor. Before the first semester began, it became evident that through no fault of my own, I would need to be late to our weekly staff meetings. I was teaching a class on one side of town right up until the beginning of our meeting which was held on the other side of town. The buildings were just far enough away to ensure that I would be walking in seven minutes tardy in front of all of my new, primarily white colleagues, including the eight to ten senior faculty who would be participating in my bi-annual evaluations.
I explained the predicament to my boss, who assured me that it wasn’t a big deal. He told me that he did not care if I was a bit late and that it was sort of typical because though no one else would be coming from the main campus like I was, many people would be arriving from other meetings or responsibilities throughout town. The school was full of kind people, each hustling and bustling, generally assuming the best of one another’s comings and goings. He didn’t think anyone would even notice my arrival times. And it turns out he was right, but I didn’t know that yet. What I did know, is that is not always prudent for a Black person to trust white hunches about what will and will not be safe.
So, each week I stressed and strategized ways to avoid being seen as scattered or shifty. Some weeks I let my class out early, praying that students would not write nasty comments on my course evaluations, though some did.
“She is always rushing.”
“She didn’t even care if we had questions at the end of class.”
“She was cold.”
Other weeks, I tried driving more quickly that I preferred to, despite my lifelong fear of being pulled over by the police. Sometimes, I just resorted to reminding everyone performatively about the parking and the construction and the anxious undergrads who might need a bit more hand-holding than the graduate and Ph.D. students that some of my colleagues were accustomed to engaging. I wasted a lot of minutes that year wringing my hands, wrenching my body, and apologizing for my inability to turn back time.
My mother, on the other hand, has always understood in ways that I am only beginning to that time is infinite—and that we are not. We can spend our days watching clocks, setting alarms, always staying one step ahead of bosses and bullies and bogeymen, but we will do so at a cost. I’ve been getting better lately at being late and “lazy.” Probably I will go too far at some point. I am allowed to, on account of my humanity. I have to remind myself of that.
For those of us who have been told over and over again,
that our rhythms are wrong,
who have been judged both for our piddling and our racing,
whose hands have been forced,
maybe this is the day to recalibrate,
springing forward or falling back as we see fit,
as present to ourselves as a mother.
*Ocean Vuong Interview on We Can Do Hard Things Podcast