The Eternal Now as it Fades into History

Getting older is strange. In 2011, I had a baby, my first baby, and those moments were seared into my memory as the Eternal Now. Those moments are still vibrant and alive for me, because they were brand new, fresh moments in a new lifetime for me—life as a mother. I was new and awake and changed in ways that were vulnerable and naked and alive.

To look up and see that those moments were a decade ago is very confusing, disorienting. The people who surrounded me in that moment are not all here anymore. Some gone through death, some gone through the natural ebb and flow of friendship. My body is different, my understanding of myself is unrecognizable in some ways.

When he emerged from my body, a whole new being, I was suddenly reborn, too; a brand new mother, a creature who had never existed before, not really. I wasn’t prepared for the way I would die on that operating table, and in the days and weeks to come. I would become a new thing, one that could not sleep until her child was in her arms. One who creates food to grow that child. One who reshapes everything about her body and mind, over and over, in the service of a safe and joyful rest for that child. A constant flow of becoming a better person, a less judgmental person, a gentler, more patient, more playful person.

I was a raw nerve, a rare fawn, stepping out into a new universe. Those moments still vibrate with energy—my atoms snapping open, a nuclear blast changing everything about everything.

So how is it possible that linear time places that awakening ten years ago? One hundred and twenty months. How is that child old enough to have nostalgia about video games we played when he was four? How can an Eternal Now be history, be a decade in the past?

I am bewildered.

I think about my neighbor, P., a lot. Her beautiful daughter, B., gone, lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. She gave birth to B. in 1966—only three years after this house was built. To me, a date clearly in the past, connected to historical events I didn’t witness. But I know that P. experiences that year as a forever Now in which the clothes aren’t dated, the music is currently everything is new.

Meanwhile, in a terrible trick of malicious public health and cruel luck, her 1966 baby is dead.

“I know everyone says I just need to accept that she’s dead, she’s gone, But…” P. said, standing in her house dress on the other side of the chain link fence that connects our back yards, her eyes lost, her brow furrowed.

“It’s going to take time,” I said. “You’ll probably pick up the phone to call or text her a hundred times a day.” She nodded.

When I was younger, I didn’t understand history to be something that accumulates inside of human bodies. I didn’t know it would build up inside of me. In many ways, that ignorance was probably nurtured in me because I’m white. At school, they taught us that history is made up of dates and events; meanwhile, I went to school with kids whose parents were born in the Jim Crow South, whose grandparents grew up under segregation, whose families left China because of the photos we were shown like it was ancient history. I sat in classrooms with classmates whose families were actively in the middle of history.

And mine was too, though the ways it was were made invisible by our whiteness, our ancestors’ choice to align with whiteness. Meanwhile, the electrified webbing of history was woven by all of us together in ways no child can truly understand.

My education failed me in that way—giving me the illusion that these events even happened the way they did—and that history teacher who tried to encourage critical thinking, who scrawled “History is Bunk” on his chalkboard on our first day, is now an active Trump supporter, according to his Facebook page.

Getting older is remarkably, painfully, bitterly strange.