Mom Math

My baby is two. How?

Every day.

My daughter allegedly turned two years old this week, but I’m skeptical. That’s impossible, because 2017 was two years ago, and she was born in 2021, which is two years from now. 

After the holidays, according to the calendar, we need to start applying to preschools for next fall, which is allegedly the year 2024, which doesn’t make any sense, because preschool is reserved for children who are two and a half, and she’s going to be a baby for at least four more years. Plus, 2012 was less than 5 years ago. 

If she’s really two, in four years she’ll turn six, which is impossible because six year olds can read, and like I said, she’ll still be a baby by then, and even the smartest babies don’t read. 

If she’s actually two, that means that two years plus a few days ago I sat with my husband and dog on a couch we no longer have in an apartment where we no longer live, heave-sobbing at the final scene of Disney’s Coco, my extremely pregnant belly indifferently roiling with activity because my baby was a uterine maniac. We didn’t know that she was a girl, then. I thought she might be a boy. 

There’s no way that my child is two years old. That means that I’ve only known her for two years, and I’ve known her for my whole life.

Was it two years ago that my normally stoic German-Norwegian doctor sounded surprised when she told me I was “strong” through the delivery? When I’d been awake for 27 of the previous 29 hours and could feel nothing from the waist down? When my husband was supposed to call whether the baby was a girl or boy, but he was so stunned by the birth that he forgot? He told me minutes later that birth looked like a Hollywood special effect. Like John Carpenter movie prosthetics. 

Was it two years ago that, for a few seconds, she was still tethered to me by her umbilical cord, purple-red and covered in blood and wax, lying for the first time on the outside of the body that built her and kept her safe. One of the nurses said “Call” and another one looked at the clock and read the time. We only hear that when we are present for a birth or a death. 

Two years? Ridiculous. It couldn’t have been two years ago that minutes after birth, she took a huge shit on my chest. That doesn’t make sense. I can’t even measure how long ago that was. It occurred on a parallel timeline. There’s no straight line between here and there. I’ve told that story way too many times for it to have only happened two years ago. It clearly had happened to the nurses before; they were so nonchalant and businesslike cleaning me up. I still couldn’t feel my legs. 

The first “year” of my daughter’s life wasn’t a year at all. It was twelve years. The second “year” took three months. Pregnancy lasted a year and a half. The last week of pregnancy lasted a month. 

Now that she’s a toddler, the hours between 5 pm and 8 pm take a full 8 hours to pass. When she is caterwauling from her crib in protest of the indignity of being asked to go to bed at a toddler time rather than a grown up time, every minute takes an hour. 

Time has warped. I used to get done in a week what now takes a month or months. I aged five years in the first year, de-aged two years in the second year, and completed three months’ worth of work in that time frame. 

The baby is getting so big that she’s not a baby anymore, but a few weeks ago we went to a Halloween fair and she was the littlest kid on the big bouncy slide. She was so tiny. She was the littlest kid I’d ever seen. Just a baby with puffy blonde pigtails and a lollipop head and a skinny little body holding up the line because she was so small and couldn’t climb as fast as the massive three-and-four-year-olds waiting in line. 

Her weight defies physics. She still wants to be carried a lot. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night crying “Up! Up,” dreaming of wanting to be held. But she’s getting so heavy. I can only carry her for half a block before my back starts aching. When she’s mid-tantrum, she somehow makes herself weigh 3,000 pounds, immovable, practically liquid in her rage. And yet, somehow, she’s still easy to toss into the air. My husband balances her on one hand like an acrobat. 

Her clothes are so little. They’re the size of tea towels. My foot would have a hard time fitting through the neck of some of her shirts. But somehow, she’s also very large. She can take up an entire queen-size bed, banishing her dad and I to the shivering edges. The huge blanket barely covers her. She’s a giant. 

I look back on photos that my phone helpfully reminds me were from a year ago. In the pictures, my little girl doesn’t have any teeth. She can’t walk, and can’t talk. Her face looks different, like a drawing of a baby. It doesn’t make sense that she was ever like that. She’s always been exactly the way she is now, and she’ll always be exactly this way, until tomorrow, a year from now, a second from now.