Two Lives

Before I gave birth to my daughter eight years ago, I had no real experience with kids. I hadn’t been around many kids, never held a baby, and had no idea what goes into raising one. I wasn’t prepared, and I now realize that nothing anyone could’ve told me would have prepared me for the actual experience.  

I knew that it would involve a lot of sleepless nights, but I didn’t know that for the first two years, my brain would feel like it was filled with cotton. I didn’t know that I’d feel like I was floating from one day to the next like a ghost haunting my own life instead of inhabiting my own body.

Nobody had told me that I’d always be trying to manipulate time, trying to bend it so it’s not what it always is, which is “now.” I’d be wishing it would move a little faster, just until she was sleeping through the night, just until she could play independently for a few minutes, just until she could start school, so I’d have a few hours to myself.

And in the next breath, I’d wish I could try to reel time back in, pull the reins tightly so it would move more slowly, or if I could pick a moment in time and stop it altogether. I’d wish she would stay two years old forever so she could always stay at home, so I wouldn’t have to share her with the world, even for a few hours a day.  

But there’s one experience in this entire journey that is more disorienting than anything else. A few days ago, when I was talking to her about something, looking at her intently, I saw myself in her. I knew, of course, that she looked a little like I did when I was her age. I don’t know if it was the way the light was hitting her face or the precise way her hair was falling over her face, but for a moment it looked as if I was looking at myself and talking to myself.

It felt surreal, like déjà vu or an out-of-body experience. Like looking in a mirror and seeing yourself, but a version of you that was frozen in time over 30 years ago. It felt like there were two separate “I’s” existing in the same timeline.

Like I was looking at myself, talking to myself, parenting myself, raising myself. Living two lives at once.

I didn’t know where to go from there. Do I raise her the way I now know I needed to be raised, so I can see how that version of me would turn out to be? Would she still be the “me” that I am right now, regardless of how I parent her?

But in a flash of a second, the moment is gone. I am me, and she is her again. Separate. Different. She reminds me of how different she is from me in a hundred little ways every day. But I’m always lurking inside her, just under her skin, occasionally making it to the surface.