The More Things Change

A novella by Karen Thornton

I could hear time passing by like a subway train speeding past a station it was supposed to stop at, gaining momentum, and riding on into oblivion. And I stood there, powerless to stop it…yearning for it to come back, but how could it? It was simply going too fast. It was already gone.

 

It started happening gradually, my sense of time going faster than I was prepared for it to go. Time seemed to stand still when I was a kid, with long months of school taking forever to give way to the freedom of summer, wearing shorts, swimming all day and playing jump rope and street tennis with friends outside well into evening. From a young age, my friends and I could stay out until nine at night all summer long. Our block in Queens was so long, with 22 kids on it, that we never needed to go anywhere else. So our parents knew it was safe to let us play out there alone at night.

 

We talked about everything then, my best girlfriends, Ellie and Claire, who lived on my street, and I. How we wanted to get married and have children and all live together in different houses on the same street, just like we did as kids, but this time there would be a giant pool in the middle of the street where our kids could swim together. And we, of course, would all still be best friends, visiting each other’s houses, having coffee together, lunch, dinners with our children.  I haven’t seen Ellie or Claire in 30 years, but the bond of those formative years makes us sisters for life.

 

After I had my own children, time started to speed up to the point where years went by in a flash, and all of a sudden we were all older than I was ready for us to be. The kids, Pete and me.

 

When I first had Jack, and then three years later, Charlie, it was unbelievable to me how all-consuming motherhood was. Everything that I was—heart, mind, soul, body—seemed to belong to them.

 

It was jarring at first, daunting. I remember leaving the house for the first time by myself after I had Jack. I just went around the corner to get pizza, and as I sat there waiting for the pie to be ready, I was practically weeping, thinking that I would never again be able to leave the house without being responsible for another person. What had I done? My life was drastically altered, never to be the same. I had wanted a baby so much, but I wasn’t prepared for the gut-wrenching commitment. It seemed like it would take forever for Jack to be independent of me. For me to be able to eat dinner without having to nurse him, bits of food from my mouth softly landing on his little head. What kind of mother can’t wait till her baby finishes nursing to eat dinner? Who lets food drop onto her baby’s head? What kind of a mother was I?

 

And then the miracle of bonding hit. Where you can’t imagine what your life was like before you had him—this incredible appendage that you never knew you had been missing all of your life. It is love like you have never known before.

 

And then, when Delia was born two years after Charlie, I remember consciously saying, ‘slow down. Take time to enjoy this. Don’t worry so much—you sort of know what you’re doing now. And this is your last baby.’ And I did take the time to enjoy them—all three of them. Jack, Charlie and Delia. I really did.

 

But there was always so much to do. Nursing, diapers, laundry, dinner, cleaning—endless cleaning. Making sure they ate; making sure they ate the right things with just the right amount of the “wrong” things so as not to make them binge eat when they got to be grown ups. Answering the endless questions—and not being able to answer at least half of them. Either because I didn’t know the answer (that happened a lot) or because they were too young to understand.

 

My husband, Pete, and I would literally fall into bed every night, exhausted and spent from the physical, mental and emotional challenges of each day. But loving it—so loving them—just the same.

 

Pete and I would spend date night, which we managed about twice a month, talking about the kids. Pete was jealous that I got to be with them all day, but I would make it up to him by filling him in on every detail. Even the most minute thing about any of the kids would interest him. It was good we had each other. Who else would listen to us? We’d even bore our parents to tears with that level of talk about our kids. But we loved every minute of it (well, maybe not the diapers, playground scrapes, or late, late nights). But mostly, it was life-changing in the best possible sense of the term.

 

And now—now our oldest, Jack, is getting ready to leave the nest. I recognize that he is five-foot-ten and ready to be on his own. But inwardly, it just doesn’t seem fair.

 

“No one ever told me when I had a baby that he would just get up and leave one day,” I say to my friend Lee over a glass of Chardonnay. We are having a rare girls-night-in. Peter took the boys to one of those ultra-violent horrible movies that I refuse to see, and Delia, our 12-year-old, is at a sleepover, so it’s just me, Lee and Jane chatting away. We try to get together once a month, but we usually go out for dinner. It’s kind of nice being in the house with the kids gone and just relaxing, all three of us with no waiter to bother us and no one caring how loudly we talk.

 

“Well, it’s not a baby that’s going to college. Jack is 17!” Jane says.

 

“I know, but couldn’t he just stay home and go to one of those nice community colleges and just live here forever?” I say only half joking.

 

“Sure,” says Jane, “he could just live here and be a full-time babysitter until all the kids in the neighborhood grow up!”

 

I don’t really want Jack to live at home and go to community college. I was thrilled when he got into Berkeley. The thing is that we live in New York, and Berkeley is in California. I tried explaining this to Jack after he broke the news to us that all of his top choices for schools were in California.

 

“You won’t be able to visit if you get homesick,” I said.

 

“Yeah, I know,” Jack said.

 

“We won’t be able to just hop in the car and come and see you on the weekends,” I said.

 

“Yeah, I know,” he said.

 

“We probably won’t be able to fly in for family weekend or any of the things they do with families since you’d be so far away.” Dead silence. More silence. “Do you really understand that, Jack? Hello?? Are you sure you still want to go all that way?”


“Even more now, Mom!”

 

“Honestly, Kate, even if he were going to school somewhere upstate, you still wouldn’t see him till the holidays,” Jane says trying to make me feel better. Her son, Oliver, is a year older than Jack. He goes to school upstate, and, it is true, he didn’t come home this past year except for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

 

“But you could drive up there anytime you want!” I say.

 

“Yeah, theoretically.  But why would I do that unless I knew he wanted me to? And believe me, they don’t want us to!”

 

“You know what it is,” I say, taking another sip of wine. We are sitting outside on the patio that Peter built five years ago with “help” from the kids, which only made it take twice as long, and it is a beautiful August evening, rare in upstate New York. Usually it is stiflingly hot and muggy this time of year, but the weather has been bizarrely forgiving this summer. No doubt a product of global warming or some other ominous catastrophe. But for now, we are blissfully unconcerned with those things.

 

We are enjoying the weather this evening. The trees are subtly rippling, the scent of honeysuckle is still in the air, and you can hear the cicadas in the woods. Actually the cicadas or crickets or whatever the hell they are creep me out sometimes when I am trying to sleep, they are so loud. So different from the sounds I heard when I was growing up in Queens. Which is why we moved up here. Some of the sights and sounds of Queens were not something I wanted my children to see and hear. The rattle of the J train, police sirens—definitely no scary bug sounds, though.

 

Not that Queens didn’t have its advantages—you could go out and get milk at 2 in the morning; you could get bread—fresh bread—at any bodega without having to wade through big supermarket aisles; and there was a vibrant ethnicity to every neighborhood. You never really needed to drive. And the bakeries—don’t get me started! Italian, Greek, German—every kind of pastry imaginable. It wasn’t until I moved to the suburbs that I even knew you could buy a cake at a supermarket. And now that I know I certainly never do! If I’m going to waste calories it’s going to be for the real thing.

 

But Queens also had cement. A lot of cement. And fewer trees. Way fewer trees. All in all, Pete and I did well moving up here. It is beautiful. And the perfect place to raise kids…in my opinion, at least.

 

And tonight I am enjoying the sound coming from whatever bugs they are as background music. Even the mosquitoes are behaving themselves. It’s probably all the wine. They’d just keel over if they bit one of us now.

 

I inhale the scent of honeysuckle—I can never seem to get enough of that smell—take another sip of wine, and get right to the point. “What I really want is to have them back when they were little,” I say. And it is true.

 

“I don’t want them to live at home forever—that would be weird! Not to mention expensive and just wrong for so many reasons. But I would love to be able to go back in time and just smell their little baby heads again.”

 

“Oh, that smell!” Lee says. “You could just eat them up back then!” Lee, in her heart of hearts, would have another baby if it wasn’t for her age. All of us are teetering on the brink of 50, so our baby days are over. “Maybe you should just have another baby, Kate!” Lee says, hopeful that one of us will be crazy enough to attempt it.

 

“OMG—shut up!” I say, laughing. “I’m 49 years old. I am not going to have another baby! I want MY babies—the ones that my kids used to be—back! How on earth did this all go by so fast?”

 

“I know, it really is true,” Lee says. “When you have your kids, it’s so all-encompassing. It takes up every minute of the day and night, and you don’t have time to blink, let alone appreciate it. And then, all of a sudden, they’re all grown up and their heads don’t smell like baby heads! They smell like Axe men’s shampoo.”

 

“Forget about their baby heads. What about their baby butts! I certainly don’t want to relive the smell of diapers!” Jane says. “I think you’re both nuts!”

 

“YOU are not sentimental,” I say, to which Jane replies, “No, I guess not, but what are you complaining for? At least you have two kids left at home,” says Jane, referring to Charlie, who is 14, and Delia.

 

“You know I hate it when people say that!” I scream. “It’s like when your dog dies and people tell you to get another one. My son is not a dog—and it’s not like I can replace him with Charlie or Delia!”

 

“No, you’re right, it’s true,” says Jane, “but what are you going to do? I for one am glad that they’re growing up,” she says. “I mean I finally don’t have to worry about childcare, Brooke’s driving now and sometimes Oliver even cooks dinner when he’s in the mood.”

The rest of the novel is available on Amazon.