growin' up

movin' on

Last week, one of the families I nanny for packed up and moved to Idaho.

Their daughter will not remember me. She’s eight months old—too little for memory. To her, I’m another hand giving a bottle, another face making sounds, another heartbeat humming her to sleep.

To me, she was six months of long, tiring days; some beautiful, many lonely. In between siren cries, I wiped milk off her face and gave her dead leaves to rip apart. I showed her how to hit a wooden spoon against a metal pot (the racket delighted her). I read her Little Blue Truck so many times that I can recite it by heart, like a prayer. To pass the time, I told her about my life. She seemed more interested in snatching the nose off my face.

Each morning, I brought her to the window and pointed out the cornfields and the highway. See that turkey vulture? Those angry-looking clouds?

At nap times, I rocked and waited, rocked and waited. I know how her breath changes when she begins to dream. I know that she sucks her knuckles as she drifts off. I know that she sleeps with her hands draped across her eyes.

As I watched, she grew—half a foot taller—then began crawling and babbling and giggling—becoming a person, starting the struggle and joy of it all.

We had a strange goodbye.

Have a good life! is what I wanted to say to her. Good luck with all that growing!

But that felt somehow facetious. So instead I squeezed her fist and tapped a thumb across her chubby cheek. “You will love Idaho,” I said, as if it were just another truth, as certain as the cornfields and the sky.

It’s been weird, liminal six months—of midwestern life, of a kind of cosplayed motherhood.

Without the pace of the academic calendar, I’m finding that adult time moves very steadily. The weeks speed by (the blooms are already fading into green) but the days linger, resisting their sunsets.

On the other hand, infant time—what Penelope Lively calls that bizarre combination of moods and needs— moves very slowly, until, suddenly, it doesn’t. My days will creep by, and then, with just a sniff and wail, they become impossibly rushed, terribly urgent. Babies live at full volume. They’re so fresh to this world, they’re all wonder and fear.

I like wonder. I can empathize with fear. I thought nannying would be a good short-term fit for me. But I’ve struggled. It can be tiring, keeping up conversation with a tiny, toothless thing who speaks mostly through smiles and sobs. I have learned to be patient, patient, patient. And sometimes, I am not. Twice, after stretches of inconsolable crying, I’ve cried too.

After long days of caretaking, my head is foggy with a strange blend of boredom and exhaustion. Day to day, I don’t speak to many other adults. In truth, it’s been a while since I’ve really put my brain to work. Sometimes I worry it’s growing dusty up there.

But this job is coming to an end soon, and there is much I will miss. Like: two weeks ago, when I took baby L, the eleven-month-old, on a long, leisurely walk. The sky was cloudless. The shade was glorious. We saw a sandhill crane and a big snapping turtle. He babbled to himself—mambo! mambo!—as robins hopped out of our path.

In a patch of grass by a stream, I took him out of the stroller and set him among small purple flowers. He fiddled with a dandelion and picked a blade of grass. I scooped him up and pressed his feet into the wet earth. Mud, I told him. This is mud. Welcome to mud.

Funny—this time last year, I was working in a rare book library. I could leave my desk, climb a few flights of stairs, pull a six-hundred-year old manuscript from a shelf and run my finger over ancient bookworm holes.

The year before that, I was finishing my thesis and preparing to graduate college. Each day felt enormous, filled to the brim. I’d hit the pillow and fall instantly asleep.

The years before that I was taking anthropology classes, writing essays about Mormonism and Marlboro cigarettes, running late to the boathouse for my shift. I was dancing in crowded rooms, meeting strangers, hearing about all kinds of childhoods, all types of dreams. Before that, I was living at home with my parents, dying to grow up.

So this silly six months is coming to an end. In a few weeks, I’ll move on again. Each spring, I am freshly startled by the way time keeps turning over. The lake has melted; later, it will freeze again.

I have no fucking clue where I will end up. I don’t even know how much a gallon of gas will cost in two days. I have to keep reminding myself: am I having any fun? Are my goals big enough? Real enough?

This, I guess, is my twenties. This shit is strange. Time moves fast and slow. There’s already much to celebrate and mourn. Everyone I know is scattered—around the globe, within the stages of their lives. Marathon, marriage, med school. Saving money, starting over, selling out. Cubicles and long commutes. Lost, looking for the map. Running in circles, dogs after tails.

We are all of us—me, you, the eight-month-old baby—learning how it is to be another day older.

It’s Monday as I write this. I’m not at work, because the baby is in Idaho.

I wander around, useless, like a Roomba finding walls. I’m making granola, I’m starting Game of Thrones, I’m going to therapy. I’m leaving the dishes in the sink and reading another Jenny Erpenbeck novel, End of Days. I’m fifty pages in, and the young German man has just arrived on Ellis Island. “If only you could know in advance where the path you choose freely will lead,” he thinks.

It’s one of those days when the weather can’t make up its mind—shifting between sun and clouds, like it’s caught between happy and sad.

I am suddenly very tired. I dog-ear the page and take a nap.