#175: Enjoy! Enjoy! Enjoy!
Eight years and one week ago I came to New York in a rush—broke my lease, quit my job, and booked a one-way ticket from San Francisco, afraid my new boss would find out I lived in the wrong timezone. My new gig as an editor wasn’t secure (it was a short-term contract to “try me out”) and I had no idea if I could do it. The move connoted all the high-flying drama of following a dream, including the fact that I’d left my boyfriend behind. I arrived at my sister’s Chelsea apartment with all my possessions, which she and my brother helped me stack in a corner before taking me to dinner, where a host seated us next to Meryl Streep, the most straightforward sign a non-believer could ask for.
My first year in New York is still vivid in my memory: walking up Lafayette Avenue, headphones on, eyes pointed up at the sparkling buildings. I picture working late with my new coworkers in our converted downtown office, cry-laughing at something stupid because we’d lost our minds. I picture meeting my brother at McCarren Park after I chopped my hair to chin-length, then walking with him to a party, where I caught myself in a mirror and thought, I am a new person. I picture my bedroom in Bushwick, the snake plant I put in the window, the dive bar dance floor where Avi and I kissed for the first time, making our other roommates scream.
I think less about the painful distance I felt from my San Francisco life, or the panicky crush of deadlines I had no clue how to meet, or the persistent terror that I was “starting over at 27” (27!)—that I had fewer friends, it seemed, than everyone else. I rarely think about the sweatily missed trains, the devastating breakup, the haunt of my own inadequacy, surrounded by a level of wealth and style I’d never seen. When I do think of those things, I don’t feel them as viscerally in my gut as the buildings, the haircut, the kiss. I recall them only as the narrative texture to my heart-throbbing joy—the thorns around the rose that make it the perfect poetic subject.
I think this is how our memories work most of the time. We stamp a particular era with a particular mood, and make the details fall in line. This is why it’s so satisfying to revel in your own past. From a comfortable distance, you get to watch the pieces play their parts: the peaks, the valleys, the payoffs, and cut all the rest for time. The most vital quality of hindsight is how it’s structured, always with a beginning, middle, and end. This is nothing like the present of course (all middle), and that’s exactly its appeal. Our nostalgia is so potent we think we remember what it was like. We believe that, given a second chance, we might be able to do it better. Slow down, worry less, appreciate more.
Parenthood has brought me nose to nose with this particular delusion. I’ve been told by several people to enjoy it, please enjoy it, because this time goes by so fast! The words are laden with the advice-giver’s own regrets, with their sense that, had they just done things a little differently—“truly enjoyed it,” for instance, whatever that means—the passage of time might not feel so brutal now. This is the fantasy of the nostalgic, that the right mental tweaks in the past could have spared us from the pain of existence we now feel, or the pain of parenthood.
I felt it right away, that parental longing to freeze time. For weeks post-birth, as I watched my baby’s weight tick up, I made note of whether, technically, she could still fit in my body. At the time this made sense as a measure of her personhood: the more she grew, the further she grew from me. An extremely hormonal thought, but somewhat prescient too. As Rachel Cusk wrote of the first days with her daughter in A Life’s Work, “We are still so close to our sundering that neither of us seems entire: the painful stump of our jointness, livid and fresh, remains.” If childhood is a plodding journey away from the mother, birth is the first step. So long as my baby could still technically fit inside my body, there existed a hypothetical in which the step had not yet been taken.
My camera roll contains over 3,000 photos of Sunny from her four-ish months of life. That number is, simply put, insane. My impulse to capture her every detail is one that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. What are all these for? What life am I choosing by prioritizing this level of documentation? The camera phone isn’t an innocent bystander, recording what would otherwise be happening. It’s completely involved—a block of metal between faces, yes, but also a barrier in the abstract. I not only take too many photos but live in the ever-present limbo of photographic possibilities. I am terrified of missing something, and so, probably, I miss things.
In her book Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso reflects on her obsession with documenting the minutiae of her life in a journal. “I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.” Eventually she has a child, is forced to allay her preoccupation in favor of more urgent needs, and eventually comes to understand “that the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life, a force indifferent to time.”
I think about that notion all the time: that forgetting is the price for presence. I thought I was getting better at accepting that—taking less photos, writing less down. And then I had a baby.
There is a popular internet “tip” for how to adequately enjoy your kid’s childhood, and it goes something like this: Whenever you’re struggling with your kids—tired, frustrated, angry—imagine you’re old and dying and have been given the chance to return to this moment, one last time, to experience what it was like to be with your children when they were young. I found this idea kind of charming at first, and eventually, a little sinister. What’s so wrong with being tired, frustrated, and angry? Why do you have to mind-game your way out of reasonable and necessary emotions? And anyway, if that future version of yourself returned for long enough, she’d probably get tired too.
I told my friend about the tip at dinner the other night and her eyes went wide with recognition. “I just know my mom raised me that way!” she laughed. “She wants to hold time still. She didn’t want us to grow up. I sense so deeply in her this feeling that our separateness is a loss. I just know she mourns that I don’t fit in her body anymore.” I got my phone out and wrote this down verbatim.
There’s an obvious corollary between the tip and the mandate to enjoy your baby before they grow up and leave you forever. Both suggest flattening parenthood into a one-note experience of nonstop joy and gratitude, a kind of fearful holding-on lest you one day miss it, or forget it, and resent your former self for not knowing you would. The same notion is often projected onto young people: kids, college students, people screwing around in their twenties. Enjoy! Enjoy! Enjoy it!
The advice makes sense only through the shimmering veil of memory. The one that tells me my first year in New York was all late-night laughter and non-stop possibility, the hard parts swept into the margins, as if the year could have been the same without them. I think it’s easy to forget how important the terrors of uncertainty are to exciting new experiences—that without them, rather than more purely good, those experiences would be a lot more dull. I suspect most phases of life engender this duality.
I wonder if, as advice-givers suggest, there’s a version of parenthood where, in hindsight, it didn’t “go so fast.” A version where you remember every little detail as much as you’d like to remember it, where you gladly move through the experience with no regrets, no ill feelings, no missed opportunities for gratitude and enjoyment. Or maybe those things—the time warps, the tough moments, the wistfulness—are what make the experience what it is. Maybe they actually make the experience better.
In This Life, a book about secular faith, Martin Hägglund crafts a robust argument for the idea that life is only meaningful because it ends. That an afterlife would actually make existence feel like an endless slog. I think of his ideas when I hear myself or other parents express a desire to freeze time. I imagine what that would really feel like: Stuck with a four-month-old forever. Or even for a year. It would drain the experience of its essential qualities: always changing, going away, becoming something new. We say we want to stop it, but we don’t really.
The irony of imagining your deathbed while holding your screaming child is that you’re attempting to enjoy your present life by projecting yourself out of it—projecting yourself, in fact, to your death. But what if being present doesn’t mean feeling good? Or storing every important thing that happens for later recollection, or making the most of every moment, as if living is your job and you want a promotion? Maybe it just means, more simply, being present.
When I imagine that my memories aren’t so important, that the point of life, or parenthood, is not to recollect it later, but to experience it as it happens, and accept the heart-wrenching price of being alive, I feel terrifyingly free. “My goal now,” Sarah Manguso writes, “is to forget it all so that I’m clean for death. Just the vaguest memory of love, of participation in the great unity.”
My favorite thing I read last week was “So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit,” by Leslie Jamison for The New Yorker, a piece I avoided reading due to discourse fatigue but was so glad once I finally did. Last Friday’s 15 things also included my new favorite top, some Eras Tour thoughts, a useful new kitchen accessory, and more. The rec of the week was bedside lamps, for which you had great suggestions!
Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley