Birthday Week: Lately Time Has Bigger Wings
Blog # 3
By Sara Ries Dziekonski
11/17/2020
I had a plan for what I would write about this week. And then this big birthday week began, and I was pulled somewhere entirely different. I think with writing, it’s important to write what we need to write rather than what we think we should write. That way the heart is in it, and for me, writing is always more beautiful that way.
Time flies is a pretty worn out phrase, but it’s true. This is what this entry is about.
Today, November seventeenth, is my son’s first birthday, and mine is in two days. A year ago I was in the hospital room with this new gorgeous life that had just came out of me after great effort, and on my birthday last year we brought him home. I’ve written of this, too, in a poem called “Your Arrival,” a poem to my son. Here are the first two stanzas:
You arrived straight from the seas of my womb,
wearing the white pasty suit of amniotic fluid,
3:44 a.m., two days before my birthday.
(On my birthday we brought you home
in the sky blue terry cloth Onesie
that your father wore home from the hospital
forty-one years earlier.)
And it feels like just last month that that happened, not an entire year ago. Sometimes I feel like I’m on a conveyor belt of time and the conveyor belt has picked up speed in recent years, like time is flying with bigger wings. I was talking to my best friend the other day about time and she said that there’s a scientific explanation for why time speeds up as we get older, something about how we make memories, she said. I’ll have to look this up. But anyway, I guess this is how time passes, this steady, this fast.
A poem I wrote earlier this month is about slowing things down. It’s something I’ve been feeling a lot lately. In the poem I check in with a good friend in Buffalo on her daughter’s two-month birthday and she says, Never before has time been so obvious. Throughout the poem, I repeat “Slow things down” and it is like a mantra and a reminder. And it ends with the demand to slow things down, to rummage for paper and pen, to write the poem even though my life or “basket of peaches may already be half eaten.”
I know it is a constant struggle for many of us to slow the noise down in our heads and live in the moment. But when we do pay attention, life can be so freaking beautiful. Like tonight we had a small backyard gathering for Teddy’s one-year birthday, and it was his first piece of cake. He took a bite and loved it, then sailed the cake happily through the air smiling until his hand made its way back to his mouth, again and again, bite after perfect bite.
With so much warmth and gratitude,
Sara
