I am sure it wasn’t Einstein who coined that phrase. I’m absolutely positive it was a mom; even if she didn’t get credit for it.
When you are a parent, time is beyond relative. Time is either eternal or it is way too short. When you have a baby, time in the possibility of being too short doesn’t exist, except when you are sleeping or taking some “me time”.
Nights, days, especially nights, turn into this abyss of long, unseemingly non-ending hours which at the end do not have a good sleep at its core. Oh no, sleep? What is that anyway?
It begins when you bring your baby home. Or in labor? Those few nights when it all ends (life as just the two of you, life in which you can go to the bathroom whenever you want and not only when you can put the baby down, life in which going out isn’t this logistically ginormous practicum), or it all begins.
So sleep eludes you but there is the excitement and the pain and you are about to meet your baby so who cares if you don’t sleep.
Then your tiny human arrives and oh joy!
You take the baby home and so it begins. Time acquires this whole other taste, and smell and consistency. You thought time was long when you were waiting for a call after a date, or when you were waiting for that new job to come through. Oh no, those elongated versions of time cannot hold a candle to baby-status time.
You have your baby, great. And baby wakes up every two-three hours to feed. And you know it won’t last long, you know at the most it will be a few weeks before the miniature you is stronger and heavier and can sleep longer chunks of time.
You know all this: in your mind. But that doesn’t help. Because when you are there it is oh so long.
Your baby isn’t latching properly and it is a nightmare and you cry and you seek a lactation consultant or two. And your mother doesn’t have very good advice because in her time no babies had latch issues, and your sister says it will pass and your friends just sigh with you over the phone. And it seems it will never end and you are a disaster and what were you thinking when you let the love of your life impregnate you… and then it passes. Your small person is latching and eating as she should. It was just four days. Four days. It felt like eternity.
That time when your tiny human had a growth spurt, do you remember that? It took two days, less than 48 hours in which he would eat every hour on the hour. You thought you would die. You were so tired. You felt you were living months and months of this. But it was just two days. You see? Elongated parenting time.
My petite dragon has been sleeping through the night more or less for the past month and a half. It’s been wonderful. It’s been heaven. Until she learnt how to roll. Now as she sleeps and vigorously sucks her thumb she rolls from her back to her stomach and gets very frustrated because her hands get stuck underneath, because she can’t roll back, because she can’t suck her thumb. Either one of them.
So she wakes up, and she wakes us up. And suddenly sleeping through the night for us doesn’t exist anymore. My darling or I have to get out of bed, go into her room (yes, she is sleeping in her crib in her own room, sigh, so fast!) and roll her back. This happens every 20-30 minutes throughout the night.
We are in it. It will never end. A whole night of sleep will never come again. It’s been three days. It feels like weeks and weeks. She is cranky during the day because she hasn’t been sleeping well. Neither have I. Neither has my husband. My puppy doesn’t complain.
And then last night she was on her tummy, and she found her thumb. And she slept. And so did we. And those days, those eternal days that spread and spread, are no longer there.
Yes, as a mother, time is most definitely relative.