Whose timeline are you on?

There’s no “right time” to recover from trauma or mourn or be in joy.

My preschooler fell 15 feet off of a play structure last week.

He was pouring blood from the back of his head and we were unsure if he had broken his neck or cracked his skull. He told me the world was spinning and though I wasn’t the one who fell, I felt the same way. We were taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital and thankfully all of his scans were clear. He left with only a single staple in the back of his head and before we even made it to the car, started running and asking about the fair we were due to attend the following day.

People always say how resilient kids are. I thought they meant psychologically, like that kids could withstand any thing and move on, and while that is partly true, I realize now that people really mean the resiliency of children’s physical bodies—these little rubber bands they call bones and the speed with which their cells regenerate.

I can suddenly relate to all the witches in kid’s fairytales trying to steal little children’s energy.

Pexels-photo by Monstera

We went to the fair the following day (as we had promised him [and the doctor okay’ed]) and he played games and rode rides and ate funnel cake as though he hadn’t been in a neck brace less than 24 hours prior. Meanwhile, I found myself looking around and wondering if I was supposed to be doing the same. I may not have been the one who fell, but my head was pounding and my body was sore. I could have fallen asleep standing in line and my heart leapt into my throat with every loud sound or sudden movement, which was often at this sensory-rich event.

I still feel that way over a week later and even with my decades long yoga practice and awareness of the nervous system, I have moments of thinking, “I should just be over it by now, right?”. I wonder how other people would have done it. Should we have been in “mourning” and not left the house the entire following week? Should I have been smiling and riding the rides and in the moment?

What should I be doing? What would they do? What’s the right way?

I was born acutely aware of time. As a little girl I would enter every season already wistful for its end. My friends would be excited for summer and enjoying the sun-soaked skies and I would be watching the calendar for June 21st when it all starts to get darker again, wondering how we were supposed to enjoy the last two and a half months when the sky was clearly telling us that summer was ending. (I have since learned that May 1 is the real beginning of summer and June 21 is technically the ‘height of summer’ which makes more sense to my cells).

I was the person counting down the days on vacation, “Only five more days in paradise,” I would lament, then I’d spend the latter half of trip checked out and depressed.

I tried to rebel against time in my early 20’s. “I don’t need to get married or have kids just because all my friends are and ‘they’ say I should,” I would drunkenly try to convince first dates.

After my mom died, I experienced the space-time continuum in ways I never had before. A crying jag would take me right back to the minutes after she passed. A smell transported me to ten years earlier. I started to wonder what timeline everyone else was following and if time even existed. But I still had the feeling that they wanted me to be done with my grief. I felt like I was expected to start smiling again at a certain point and to stop talking about her at another.

Meeting my husband put me on a direct route toward creating a family that came with the very timetables I had once vowed to ignore. But whether it’s because of people’s curious questions or your own awareness, an internal clock starts ticking louder and louder and whether you plan it or not, you are married in two years and pregnant a year after that, because that is what they did.

Time seems to stand still when you are trying to get pregnant and finally pregnant. The term the “two week” wait refers to the interminable time between conception and potential pregnancy. There's a saying that the “days are long and the years are short” meant to apply when the kids are earthside, but I think this really starts in pregnancy.

Pexels- Photo by samer daboul

“How many weeks are you?” “When are you due?” “About to pop, eh?” even the most random of strangers talk to you about your time. Doctors push delivery dates and you are hooked up to an IV and inducing the baby into the world before they are truly ready, because the doctor said so. They said so.

Imagine being rushed into the world before you were truly ready. No wonder we all feel like we’re constantly running late.

And the pressure for the parents to be hit their due date doesn’t abate after the baby is born. It increases. You're expected to return to work before you have even stopped bleeding and the world that seemed so curious about your pregnancy could suddenly care less about how you're faring as a new parenthood. They expect you to get right back on the time train with them, meeting deadlines and preparing for the next kid.

I was asked multiple times if I was a going to try for a girl before my second son was even out of my body.

The idea that most OBGYNs “clear” parents six to eight weeks after giving birth to exercise and have sex and that we wait for that magical clearance appalls me and yet there I was after both pregnancies. Excited like a little puppy waiting for the all-knowing doctor to examine me for a total of one minute and tell me I could exercise again. I’m peeing myself in jumping jacks, but they said I could. I must be okay? Why aren’t I okay?

And we feel behind yet again. We haven’t even begun our journeys as parents and we are already behind. Day care waitlists, summer camp sign up hell, activity over-scheduling, so-and-so got this for their birthday, so-and-so did this for the party. What are you doing? Keep up.

And if you choose not to follow this “natural” social order??? If you choose to stay single and not be married with two kids and a house by your 40’s? How dare you stray from their timeline!

Kids or no kids, we’re collectively experiencing this time pressure when it comes to the pandemic we’re all supposed to be over and moved on from. People are confused when their anxiety is higher than it’s ever been or their children are having social troubles at school. “Why am I on such high alert in public? What’s wrong with me,” you ask yourself, not considering that you didn’t step foot in public for nearly two years and when you did you were told people were dangerous.

I co-led a circle for The Yoga of Parenting recently and I was surprised at first by how many people brought up their ongoing trauma from the pandemic.

I keep forgetting. The social pressure to move on and stay on time has been so powerful that even me, someone who gauges her nervous system hourly and uses the word trauma at least once a day, forgot. ‘Forgot’ is the wrong word, because my body is well aware. I tried to override the natural order of things. I tried to override my natural pacing.

I was so concerned with them and their expectations that I stopped listening to me and my needs.

We all shared we were not “over” the pandemic and that healing had really only just begun.

This confession allowed me to stepped off the hamster wheel of time for a brief moment.

It allowed me to take a deep breath and ask myself, “Whose timeline is this anyway?”

My friend Jen Pastiloff likes to say, “You’re right on time.”

Time is relative and the only person that knows when you need to be doing something is YOU. Not them. Not the doctors or the stranger on the bus. Not your kid’s teacher or your boss. Only you know what the right timing is for you.

Well, you and the universe.

You can step off the bullet train of life that so many people are unconsciously stuck on. Time is just a construct. You don’t have to be trapped on this train to nowhere.

You can be mourning decades later. You can take your sweet time coming back to something or never “return” at all. You can laugh with loved ones who have passed or dream up beautiful futures with loved ones yet to arrive.

You can be anywhere you want to be.

You can be anyWHEN you want to be.