The cliché is true: The world divides into two kinds of people - those who have children and those who don’t. This is true no matter if your baby is one day, two weeks, six weeks and four days (aka today) or any other age. This is not true of being pregnant: Pregnancy is still a time where, although you are physically encumbered and psychically constrained, you can still identify primarily as yourself. Having a baby requires you to relate to the world primarily through your baby. Time changes: As the mother of an infant, time is a slog of wet cement to wade through, with days, hours and even minutes dictated entirely by the mood of another: ‘Now we are having a good day (less crying) now we are having a bad day (more crying); for these ten minutes we are quiet’. An hour, two… then three passes by and the fear comes again… Will he wake and want feeding/burping/how will I know if he is happy? /what is the best way to parent him? How could the 8 hours of intermittent crying/burping/feeding we endured last Friday in reality have lasted a hundred years?
Why does time collapse and expand in such an hallucinogenic way when you are living with an infant?
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