How Love Can Stop Time

A photoessay on new motherhood and the paradox of willing time to stop while willing love to grow.

Oct 21, 2024

I built a time-machine and it’s called Motherhood.

All of the childhood memories I have swirling around in my head are suddenly playing out like a vintage film screening on the cottage yellow walls of my daughter’s nursery.

The blue horizon, the backdrop for early morning feedings lately, was first the backdrop for watching my mom sneak love notes into my lunchbox and laying out my favorite soccer practice outfits with my dad before school. The 90s home videos of baby bath time, my plastic people-person toy splashing through the water, now remastered in my daughter’s hand as a silicone Mr. Nom Nom. The Madeline books I obsessed over, now sitting on nursery shelves, dusted and shiny, waiting to be discovered again. The grainy Fuji-film photographs of me in a cow costume, now in digital of my daughter dressed like a hotdog. The bursting linen photo albums that my stepmom fills year after year, now begin to fill with special snapshots of Joni’s first months of life.

The newborn phase was equal parts begging time to move faster to survive the chaos while begging time to stop so I could be trapped in a contact nap forever. In those quiet sleepy moments, I realized that the nostalgia for my youth was beginning to manifest itself in the present.

I get to live my life all over again, all of the best parts reserved for my daughter.

Time has been visual for me these past three months. I see time and stop time in photographs — on my phone, on my old Nikon, in my head. Glimmers I refuse to let waft past me in the amnesia plume of postpartum.

I want to remember. I want to remember. I want to remember.

Motherhood is just visual poetry, after all.

How Love Can Stop Time, a Photoessay

In the same pajamas I wore day after day, I found myself blurring time. Watching my daughter’s tiny hand tug on my neckline one particular afternoon in July, I bounded for my phone, suddenly wanting to remember each pull as a separate moment worth celebrating.

The day in her strawberry onesie, watching the Olympics, when she made a drool pile the size of a dessert plate on my chest.

The day in her star pajamas, watching Game of Thrones, when she let out a chirpy coo I’d never heard before.

The same couch. The same nap trap. The same purple knit pajamas.

But time was not the same — and neither was she.

She doesn’t yet understand me when I chant “I love you” over and over again, but she can hear my voice with her little ears worthy of being illustrated in an anatomy textbook, the image of her in my womb sculpted on them in certain light.

Or maybe she does understand.

Maybe she understands love not yet in words, but in all the other things.

Love as safety, comfort, warm milk, and warm toes with the trust to expose them (as if I’m not about to eat her feet or press them gently with my thumb to watch them curl at any given moment of exposure).

We rest and we rest and we rest, and suddenly, time shifts.

Her hand finds mine.

It begins to explore. Grasp. Extend.

The grip of a mighty warrior disarming me in a cherry ruffle onesie.

A hand becomes a thing made for holding.

Time keeps moving and so does she.

Her legs, filling out and kicking. Her awareness, becoming.

Reaching for me just before sleep, intentionally, not like a reflex.

She does not dare let go.

Neither do I.

And then all at once, I have blinked and there are two hands feeling their way around my fingers.

My body, once a home, now a toy, piquing curiosity and soft adventures.

She starts to pull my fingers apart. She laughs like she is reveling in a joyful rebellion against her own capabilities, ‘ha! look what I can do now!’

She never tires of this. She is never bored.

She is always interested, searching, feeling.

Pinkies out, of course.

Time shifts again without warning. I was mesmerized and forgot about the clock, despite its perpetual ticking in the background. More quietly, lately, but on and on it persists. It doesn’t wait for me to become aware of it.

I come back to the now and I panic. I don’t see her hands — she’s finding other things to hold apart from me. When did this happen? Where have my eyes been?

Her clothes. Her bottles. Her rattles. She sees and she touches and I clap and I cry.

Her binky, she holds all by herself.

But I have stopped time, you see.

I have tricked it and found the infinite present.

I can relive these moments over and over again like I’m rewatching my favorite movie. I can scroll and scroll and scroll and find myself back at the beginning on an endless loop and I can watch it as many times as I want and I can look up and still find her next to me in all places — past, present, and future.

Time is an illusion of circles and I am a time traveler plummeting through its cyclical liminal space.

I watch her today. And I watch her yesterday. And the day before that and the day before that and the day before that and —

One day she will watch me watching her read this and everything else I scribbled in the stardust I gathered when I fell through this strange motherhood dimension.

And she will already know how to stop time because she will see that she always has been, and always will be, loved.

Xo,

Violet Carol

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