Timing is everything

In parenting, as in comedy, timing is everything. When you have a brand-new, breathtakingly mysterious infant, it’s all about the moment-to-moment increments — generally, some variation on the question of What will keep this creature quiet and peaceful for the next minute? Parenting advice columns try to teach you how to stretch out the time between his feedings or how to prolong her nap.

Gradually, you start measuring time in weeks and months — when I signed my name on emails to my “June through December 2012 Forest Hills parents” Google group, I’d type “Rachel (Eli, 18 weeks).” Every month on the 16th, when I look at my Timehop app, it’s filled with pictures of baby Eli wearing his special onesie that proclaimed how many months old he was.

You’ve all seen similar pictures in your own Facebook feed, and some of them are invariably accompanied by shameful confessions about how they are “a few dates/weeks/months late, oops!” Because in parenting, as in comedy, it’s hard to get the timing right: You’re always either too early or too late.

Before I was a parent, I prided myself on my unfailing punctuality. As a parent, I’m either punctual alongside a whiny 5-year-old who’s irritated that he didn’t get a chance to gather as many Skylanders as he liked before I hustled him out the door and who’s growing increasingly antsty that the event isn’t starting on time, or I’m late.

Because I have a pathological fear of being late, I make sure to build in oceans of extra time when I’m going somewhere with Eli. The problem is that Eli thinks all that extra time is for negotiating about whether he can bring toys to school and for pretending he doesn’t know how to put his own socks and shoes on and desperately requires assistance. So I always feel like I’m rushing him out the door, even though we are on time, which is actually early.

“Are we late?” he’ll ask, bewildered by my frenzied exhortations to move faster as he saunters casually to the elevator.

“No! Are we ever late?!” I will retort, even the mention of the word “late” striking terror into my prompt heart.

In our apartment, beginning at 6 a.m., Eli is a tornado of activity, streaking through the living room in only his underwear and speeding from room to room. But once outside, he becomes slothlike, with nearby distractions slowing him to a crawl and a seeming inability to walk and talk at the same time. He frequently halts to gesticulate while expounding on an important point of clarification, and he also likes to take what he calls “shortcuts,” i.e., unnecessary diversions through ramps and staircases outside other buildings on the way to school.

When the weather is nice, I’m game for a good stroll on the way to school. But now that it’s cold, I frequently find myself several paces ahead of him, glancing back, because I’ve learned that if I pause to wait up for him, he’ll slow to a halt too.

But after we cross the last street, somewhere between a full block and half a block before the school building, he’ll suddenly yell, “Love you! Bye!” and take off like he’s been jet-propelled. I watch the flaps of his hat blowing in the breeze as he shrugs his backpack in closer to his body to make himself more aerodynamic, tucking his head low like he’s a football player weaving in and out of other pedestrians. If I’m lucky, he pauses just before the school gate to send me air kisses and “air hugs,” and I shout, “Be kind! Learn stuff! Have fun!”

And then he’s gone. He’s started the walk as the turtle and ended as the hare. Then suddenly all the time I’ve saved up getting us to school early is more time for me to miss him, the way I do when he finally falls asleep after popping out of his room six times, or when I find myself in the presence of other children who are cute and all, but not Eli.

Somehow, even after all the sturm und drang of the morning — the requests for additional breakfast foods, the board games he sets up for the two of us to play, the seven times I ask him to get dressed before he does it, the standoff when he tries to sneak a toy into his backpack and I catch him, the groaning over which jacket I hand him to wear and how heavy his backpack is — it’s always that last part that sticks with me as I walk alone to the subway: the way he looks when he’s no longer with me, the way he holds his body apart and his eyes are somewhere else, his own country.

I think that’s how timing so often goes in parenting: interminably, and then suddenly; slowly, and then all at once. You want them to go away so you can miss them, and then they do and then you do. Timing is everything.