It’s 2.39 am. On Sunday the clocks settled on summertime in Europe. I remember the hour. I was putting our child to sleep, and right when it should have been 2 am, it was 3 am instead. I felt, once again, like I had slipped into a rabbit hole and fallen out of time. This feeling has been somewhat synonymous with motherhood. There is the weekly count that serves as a qualifier for age. Today our child is five weeks old. This carries certain physiological and psychological connotations. He has achieved certain developmental milestones solely by the virtue of having been alive outside of me for a specific time frame.
 
Ever since his birth, however, he and I have been in the process of aligning our bodies, and this synchronising gesture takes place within and outside of time, simply because his heart beats at a different pace from mine. It always has, but until five weeks ago, it was still nestled within my womb. The attempt at harmonising our individual paces means I must inhabit time differently, think of day and night as conflated. And yet, this has been the most challenging aspect of caregiving—being alert at these post-midnight-early-dawn hours. If the last five weeks are anything to go by, I shouldn’t be afraid that he will stir or wake up at this moment after I have turned him in and he is secure in his crib. But the anxiety persists. Because falling out of time has involved having to make peace with the unpredictability of his movements; the fact that he has a will that is independent of my own, has a hunger that is dependent on me for satiation and is yet sovereign.

Having gotten used to sleeping continuously from about 10 or 11 pm until at least 8am, even until the very end of my pregnancy, I find the interruptions disruptive to my consciousness and enabling of the cumulative exhaustion of mothering. Sometimes, especially when I am putting him to sleep and he is collapsed within the wingspan of my arms, his breath steady, his eyes closed, I think of these two terms: maternal surrender and maternal suspense.