Originally Published: Washington Post • May 9, 2010
Of the many articles I wrote for the Post, this op-ed, about the strange way time shifts when you have a child, got the greatest flood of reader emails.
We don’t have time. I’m terribly conscious of it. Every moment is gone as I notice it. In our old lives all we had was time — wasted time, long evenings, late mornings. But now: Isn’t it strange how time compresses, how you can be nostalgic for a thing even as you’re in the midst of it? I’ve never been so aware of how unstable life is, how it never pauses, not even for a night. In her sleep she is growing. In the middle of the night she pulls herself up to stand for the first time, and can’t get down. She cries. My husband goes in to save her.