I’m nearing the end of Michael Chabon’s book of essays, Manhood for Amateurs. I’ve been reading it for about two months now, approximately the average amount of time it takes me to finish a book since Lily has decided that if I am going to read while waiting for her to fall asleep I will have to wait a long time indeed. Nowadays, I am expected to model good behavior by turning out the light and closing my eyes as I lie next to her, generally resulting in a little 9 p.m. nap for me, which can’t be a bad thing, except to the extent that it does not last eight or nine hours.
At any rate, in his essay “Normal Time,” Chabon pinpoints exactly the nature of that feeling I get when a particularly resonant song from a different part of my life comes on the radio. It is not, he posits, a feeling of nostalgia for a past that no longer exists. Instead, I, like him, feel as if the world of my life in, say, 1981, still exists somewhere, continues to operate in a kind of parallel universe while I and my present world go about our business. And the nostalgia I feel, with a soupcon of comfort drifting through it, comes from the very sense that this world is still out there, even if I have left it.
Hence, in the days when I was a runner (also still out there somewhere where I left them ten or so years ago), whenever I visited my parents’ house in Los Angeles I was convinced that my morning runs took me past the still-homes of Billy and Kathy, as if they had never moved out of their parents’ houses, that I might see Ann emerging from the 7-11 by Gardner Park, despite the fact that she, like me, had aged into her thirties and was unlikely to be purchasing Slurpees and hanging out in front of the library crushing on Nick.
Chabon’s more pertinent point — both for his essay and for what I want to say here — is that the same sort of faith, the same sort of belief that a parallel universe exists somewhere out there, informs a parent’s certainty that there is such a thing as that time when things will calm down and return to normal.
Summer, it occurs to me, is a particularly fertile time for our devotion to the concept of normal time, as if it grows more quickly in the heat, along with weeds, children’s fingernails, and impatience.
There is always something to do in the summer — and I am always grateful for it. Why pull out the toy train set when you can take the kids downtown to Splasheville, the brilliant public space where jets of water shoot up out of the sidewalk and your kids can cool off and get wet without you having to tread water in the deep end for hours at a time while Jake tirelessly jumps off the diving board? Who needs dinner at 6:30 when that diving board is available most weeknights until 7? And what about all the festivals and picnics, parties and dinners on the deck? Summer is inherently about not having — not needing — normal time.
I thought about this in a bordering-on-panicky sense this weekend. It began with a lovely birthday party at a park by the Nature Center. The party concluded with a group swim at the nearby public pool that I had always considered abandoned and quite possibly haunted. The Nature Center, I speculated, must be on our Labor Day to Memorial Day list of activities, a place I have somehow never driven to in the past three years when what turned out to be a pretty terrific pool was actually open.
That we don’t frequent the Nature Center during the summer struck me as surprising more than as a reminder of how much I am frightened of the fall because it means that winter is coming and I am even more frightened of winter. (It’s okay. Take deep breaths. Mike will be available to stay home with you and the kids on snow days this year.) What really got me thinking about the difference between having so much fun I don’t need normal time and needing it very much indeed was our visit to the mall playground yesterday.
As I have written in the past, my relationship with the mall playground has grown from one of shameful desperation to a grudging appreciation of a place where my children can run around somewhere that is not my house and I don’t have to wear a winter coat while they do it. But in the summer? It felt kind of dirty (although, I hasten to add, it was actually cleaner than I remember it, probably because I’m not the only one who resorts to it only in the winter).
Usually, we spend our Sunday mornings at the JCC pool, a built-in play date, where we are guaranteed to see friends and tire out our kids and generally have a pretty good time. (Does this make it normal time?) But this weekend Grandma was visiting and her bathing suit was not. Since 90-plus-degree days are conducive only to swimming pools and air conditioning, we headed to the mall playground.
And here, as sixteen-month-old Lily threw herself fearlessly down the slide, Grandma and I began to reminisce about the time sixteen-month-old Jake — never the daredevil his sister has turned out to be — catapulted head-first down that same slide. Which memory conjured up that parallel universe that I not only assume exists but desperately want to exist because otherwise sixteen-month-old Jake is gone forever no matter how many pictures I took of him.
The parallel universe of our children’s past, it turns out, is the fix that keeps us attached to the belief in the parallel universe of normal time. We want them to be sixteen months old again almost as much as we want them to grow up and let us read a book while they play in the pool. And we want them to grow up and watch something besides Toy Story over and over again with us on stormy winter days almost as much as we want them to stay forever at the age where they wrap soft, squishy arms around our neck and say, “mmmmwhaah!” with pursed lips as they push their baby faces into ours.
I’m going to go out on a limb here — one I suspect Chabon would like to push me from if he were to know or care that I’m saying it — and hypothesize that we want and fear normal time in equal measures.
Sure, it’s great to have it out there as our parental Holy Grail, that week away from the kids at a Hawaiian spa that we can’t afford and would get tired of after a day or two even if we could stand being away from the kids for that long. But the very thought of normal time — of being on a schedule with everything under control and nothing to distract me — also makes my stomach ache.
And here, I start to wander toward what I have learned in yoga. That craving for something to look forward to to propel me through days of sameness has been with me probably since I began school and had my life measured in units like report cards and winter breaks and weekends that crash to a halt with the vaguely ill peacefulness of Sunday evenings reading a book in the living room. It got worse when I lost the artificially imposed structure of an academic calendar and calmed my nerves every morning on my walk to the advertising agency at which I squandered my talents xeroxing mechanicals after I graduated from college by ticking off the weekend plans I had acquired, stretching them out in a string before me like the Kiddles I used to stretch end-to-end in my bedroom when I was five.
Sadly, the habit sticks even with kids. What birthday parties, what family visits, how many evenings at the pool do we have available to spice up our lives, to help me avoid the down time with small children that, when I think about it, no longer scares me like it did when Jake was a year-and-a-half and demanded that I be his constant (slightly harried, more than a little bit bored) playmate?
I am no longer frightened of normal time — and I’ll bet Michael Chabon isn’t either because his kids are well beyond the age when normal time means spending every moment entertaining them, feeding them, and/or attending to their hygiene. Yet I still avoid it.
And then, once I’ve successfully avoided it I long for it, in exactly the way Chabon describes.
This is the restlessness our monkey minds like to stir up, a dystopia of unrealizable unrealities that distracts us from the present moment.
The present moment is a simple enough concept in the abstract. Be in the moment. Enjoy the journey, not the destination. Be present. And then pick up your kids from daycare and just try to stay smug about how you’ve mastered these concepts.
And yet, as always, in their very challenge, my kids turn out to be my best yoga teachers. Just as the very thought of all it takes to be a parent can paralyze me sometimes, being steeped in the Now of it reminds me of how much I love it, how little I really care that normal time does not exist for me any longer, except, perhaps, as solace for the idea that one day my children will be teenagers and will no longer cuddle in my lap and may not even like me very much. Then, I tell myself, I’ll have plenty of normal time. Think of all those people contemplating parenthood who have the luxury of trying to picture what it is like to no longer have time for that morning run and how you searched for the words to explain to them how once you are a parent you just give up that morning run and resent that you have to even though you wouldn’t for a minute do it differently.
Really understanding living in the present, for me, comes only in those precious moments when Toy Story has ended but not the rain and Jake says, “What should we do?” and we practice crow balance together and he puts his hands on the ground and kicks up in the air and laughs as he falls to the ground and his sister crawls on top of me and we all laugh together. And I want to be in no other time than this moment that scared me just before it began.
Crow Balance (Bakasana) Instructions
also (courtesy of Jake and our yoga session yesterday): vrksasana (tree pose), setu bandha sarvangasana (bridge), and (just to be silly because the rug is slippery and you end up falling on your head) urdhva danurasana (upward facing bow)