Tears roll down his cheeks, my poor third child. I scoop him up, shushing—he’s not a difficult baby, and it doesn’t take much other than to hold him to quiet his fussing. How long has he been crying in his swing? My heart drops for probably the tenth time that day. I’m failing. As the baby snuggles in my arms, I realize it’s after 4 p.m. and my two-year-old is not up from his nap yet. I creep into his room, wake him, and put his groggy, smelly toddler body on the toilet.

I juggle the baby and toddler and vaguely wonder if we might be able to do baths tonight, if we’ll have time. Time! I try to estimate how long it’s been since I left my computer screen to pick up the baby—seconds? minutes?—and hope the children can’t sense my rising blood pressure. I try to settle both children comfortably back in the living room for some television time with their sister, my five-year-old. I jump back to my laptop and my ever-pressing work, editing and publishing. I see my first unread email was received four minutes ago. Four minutes? I think, four minutes isn’t bad. I mentally high-five myself for my efficiency, but only briefly: the email is from a client who wants a project update over the phone. I tag in my husband who pauses his own work to take point with the children.

“Okay, just remember I have a video meeting with my team in fifteen minutes,” he says.

I nod and hurry to shut myself in our bedroom and dial. My client is worried. His book isn’t coming along well. His writer didn’t follow up with him and he’s distracted—he’d like to talk through ideas for his cover. I explain the process, not for the first time. The client has not been responsive to his writer’s emails and phone calls, and addressing the issue tactfully is critical. I am on. Charming, deferential, authoritative… I’m good at my job, and when we close our call a half hour later, I congratulate myself before I realize my husband is halfway into his own work call in the living room with the baby again crying as his background.

I leap over crushed crackers in the dining room on the way to embrace the squalling infant once again, and I’m sweating. He’s clearly not settled, but there are only a few minutes left in the workday. I was almost done with the book layout I was working on earlier, and if I can just get through it… I put him on his tummy-time mat and sit with my laptop next to him, absentmindedly soothing his occasional whines. I cram through the layout and fire off emails, adrenaline pumping as I cringe over all the things I’m not doing.

“Does he need a change?” my husband interrupts, and I mumble something back, engaged in my work and barely registering his presence. “Babe, I asked, does he need changed?”

I look up. It is 5:32, and I’ve certainly made up any time I lost earlier by caring for the children. I finish out my final saves and shut my laptop—my husband takes the baby and I look around the house like I’m coming up for air. I plan an attack on the clutter, messes, spilled art supplies, and scattered toys. I am a general waging war on chaos while tackling dinner and keeping the older kids occupied. Like a computer scratch disk, my mind hums background programs of task lists yet to do.

My days are not always like this. Typically, everything chugs along in its prescribed pattern, a choreographed juggling act that mostly goes according to plan and ends up “balanced” even when it doesn’t. But sometimes, the balls wobble out of sync and begin to drop. I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, I’m drowning in an ocean of obligations and good intentions, choked by that ultimate limit: time.

It is difficult to be a Christian, parent, hobbyist, relative, friend, professional—anything in the modern era. We live on a steady diet of “betterness,” encouraging us to make each second count. Our identities intertwine with our jobs, which are only worthy if the years we spend doing them stack up into an overarching career. If we cannot be the Absolute Best Parents Ever™ by devoting our time, energy, and money exclusively to the children, then we shouldn’t have any. The isolation of the pandemic is made unbearable in its emphasis that, whether single, married, childless, or rearing a full house, each life’s worth and sustainability is dependent on its ability to float alone, unsupported, contributing dutifully to the economy.

I have failed before I have even begun. My race against time is futile. Through laziness or sheer resignation, I am not up for the challenge. I don’t know how long I have in this life, but it isn’t enough. It’s never enough. Yet, when the frantic pace gives way to this realization, like an eddied stream giving way to a still pool, the confusion clarifies. The lesser things, task lists, humming demands of things not done; they fall away. In this stillness, I reclaim my various identities that get lost in the business of lesser things. For a time, my recognition of time–both its vastness and its limitations—gives just a glimpse of a world, of myself, freed from time. As my facade of efficiency crumbles, I have the briefest impression of myself as my Creator must see me.

Daughter, I imagine a voice, you were not made to count seconds. 

My mother-in-law is fond of saying “the days are long and the years are short” when she reflects on parenting. The more I parent, the more it rings true, and points me toward eternity. Regardless of what the clock says, there’s no objective measure of time. It speeds by in eight hours of work or the thirteen thin years between now and when my daughter reaches the age of majority. It drags on in dull meetings or midnight hours spent feeding and rocking my cherubic babies.

Eternity itself sounds overwhelming, like the seconds that stretch infinitely through space piled up, stretching beyond the stars. But time, like all things measurable, has a beginning and end, rather like a book with a ribbon marking its place. I am only a chapter; this moment is marked, each paragraph moves me forward.

Daughter, where are you going?

There will never be enough time. Children grow and no longer need the entertainment or attention they once craved. The tedious work of the parental juggler, shifting priorities and caregiving, bottles and diapers and dentist appointments, is but a brief performance, precious, fleeting, and unrepeatable. There will never be an end to the demands of one’s job—the machine only ever needs more fuel; the monster, more food. Technology and ingenuity have given Americans more leisure time than has ever existed in human history. How do we use this luxury?  Often we create more work, more ways to maximize the efficiency of our time.

I am no stranger to this phenomenon. I live in my grandparents’ old house and have spent hours cleaning through the remains of their hobbies. My grandfather’s wood carvings, half-begun and never finished, fill boxes that crowd shelves that line the walls of the basement. I recently helped my father load some in his car. As we lugged boxes upstairs and stacked them haphazardly in his trunk, I rolled my eyes. “Daddy, these are projects Grandpa couldn’t finish in his own lifetime. What makes you think you’re going to be able to do it?” As soon as I said it, my hypocrisy struck me as I considered my own imagined projects and the piles of books I intend to read at some indeterminate point. The brevity of life and the wideness of eternity render our labors, hobbies, and entertainments—even those of my grandfather’s eighty-plus years—futile.

Daughter, what are you working FOR?

“All things must come to an end.” This statement closes the book of time itself, and reminds us that each personal chapter has a final period. Instead of having a hurrying effect, though, this statement inspires a pause. The universal and timeless appeal of such aphorisms (tempus fugit, carpe diem, memento mori) is in rightly ordering the tasks of the temporal world. Work is not an end in and of itself, but the means to an end. The priority of a diaper change or a sink of dishes is both in its physical necessity and in its sacrifice of love.

Daughter, what do you love?

There is comfort there—that when the juggler has ceased to juggle, when I am no longer in the world, my love will remain, untethered by time. My heedless race against the clock at work becomes an embrace of my cross, a sacrifice I make both for my clients and family. My tired repetition of chores is sanctified as proof of my love for those who eat off the washed plates and laundered clothes. My learned patience as I play the games of toddlers bears fruit here and in the hereafter. These sacrifices are limitations but also my means of salvation.

Time, then, is not just a limit. Rather it is a rule that sets us free, like a ladder we can climb to an unclocked destination. Someday, time itself will pass away. All that will remain of it is the husked cocoon, the waste, shuffled off like unfit clothes by the glory of what we became.

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