Time Traveling with my Toddler

Baltimore friends, I will be at The Womb Room’s mini-holiday market on Saturday, December 7th from 2-5 pm with copies of my books, and copies of my kid-lit magazine. If you’re free, stop by, enjoy some refreshments, shop for gifts, and bring the kids for a special Music for Littles class. Learn more and register here.

And come join me in December on the final Monday of the month at 7pm for our parents Writing Circle. Come help me build a community where we can connect with and support fellow parent-writers in the years ahead.

I have been transported back in time.

My toddler and I spent the morning driving Hot Wheels cars across the floor and along window sills. He quietly vroom-vroomed, lips puckered, eyes focused and serious. I almost slipped and called him by his brother’s name.

We went for a walk in the neighborhood and had the good fortune to stumble across a construction crew preparing to dig out the basement of a rowhouse. A small excavator dropped its scoop into a hole in the sidewalk, pulled up its bucket full of dirt, and then dumped the dirt on a tarp the workers had laid out on the road. Again and again. We stopped and watched this for half an hour.

These are new experiences of a life I have already lived. I feel as if I am both in the moment and living in the past like I have been split into two dimensions and am aware of my existence in both, inhabiting them side by side. Before having my second child, I had heard many times that having another baby really opens your eyes to how remarkably different and unique every child is, and this is true. But I have also discovered how eerily similar two people can be while remaining wholly themselves. How each child has an individual essence while simultaneously displaying the mannerisms and sounds, even at times the essential spirit, of their sibling so clearly that it seems as if they have been possessed by one another, or swapped bodies in a Freaky Friday style prank they have decided to pull on me. Parenting twins must be a truly wild ride.

This is a strange moment in time to be happy. Every day there is more bad news, more worrisome predictions and declarations of what Trump will do. The daylight is waning and so too is my energy, and yet, I feel incredible.

I am eight weeks out from my surgery and the pain that I lived with for so long I had begun to believe it was a normal part of life has basically vanished. I get small flare-ups here and there and my body is weak and atrophied, so as I begin to exercise again I feel quite sore, but it is sore in an expected way. A good way. A way that signals progress and strength.

We are hosting my husband’s family for Thanksgiving and my hidden secret is that I love to host Thanksgiving. It’s not simply because traveling with young children during the holidays is an extra special level of stress and anxiety on top of the existing anxiety I feel about traveling more generally, though that’s certainly part of it. (I have a fairly intense fear of flying that I have to actively tamp down to go anywhere and long distances in the car aren’t much better because I spend the whole trip on high alert for every possibility of ending up in a car accident.) I love hosting Thanksgiving because it’s pretty much the one time each year when my husband and I can spend the day together in the kitchen, cooking and chatting and enjoying each other’s company in a way we so often did before having kids. There’s plenty of family around to entertain the kids and the meal prep is a long, slow process that he and I can linger over or dip in and out of throughout the day as we desire. It’s a really pleasant change of pace from the more perfunctory act of cooking dinner every night. Our Thanksgiving preparation feels intentional, thoughtful, loving—all the qualities that people who love cooking and feel called to it as a vocation or hobby tend to point out when talking about it.

So right now, I am happy. Even peaceful. Though I don’t say so in these exact words when someone asks me “How are you doing?” with the kind of solemn tone that feels more befitting of our current environment. “Oh, man, I’ve never been better!” is a weird response in this sky-is-falling moment. Read the room and all that. But I am actually pretty great right now, and at least here in this newsletter post, I’m going to embrace it. I know that I will get back to feeling anxious and gloomy soon enough.

I have been focusing on small acts of community to help stave off existential dread. I’ve been volunteering at my son’s school and it has been nice to feel more at home in the place where he spends so much of his time. I coordinated a writing circle for parents and we had our first meetup last night. It was a small, but wonderful group, and I look forward to returning next month and watching it grow over time. I spoke to the children’s librarian at our neighborhood branch and copies of Little Thoughts Press, the children’s magazine I publish, will now be included in their periodicals section. I’m excited to share the work of so many talented writers and artists with the young readers in my community. In this season meant for gratitude, I am focusing on the parts of my life that I feel most grateful for: the health of my family members, the joy of watching my boys grow, the time and energy to focus on projects that excite and challenge me, the opportunity to pause and watch an excavator perform its task of scooping and dumping, of being in the present and inhabiting the past all at once. I have been here before, a child in my arms, unsure of what the next four years will bring.

After we finally had our fill of watching the excavator work, we continued our neighborhood loop to head back home. We passed by a small park with lots of trees at the exact moment a blustery gust of wind shook a flurry of leaves from their branches. “Look at the leaves!” I said, and my son did the same thing his brother used to do when he was this age. He reached his arms up into the air and swayed them back and forth like a tree bowing with the wind. We stood for a moment watching the leaves fall, marveling at their colors. The way they danced and fluttered to the ground made me think of bells chiming, a bright, clear sound carried by the wind, marking time.

You can find more of my writing & contact information at clairemtaylor.com. If you’d like to further support my work, please consider purchasing one of my books, or a copy of Little Thoughts Press. I also have a ko-fi page.