Mothering Time

What does it mean to live in time and to give time?

We are by the sea and I’m reading Cacophony of Bone by Kerri ní Dochartaigh while listening to waves against pebbles. Amongst all the things the book and the sea are making me think about, I’m thinking most about time. Probably because I have an iffy relationship with it.

I’ve always loathed wearing a watch and am hopeless at keeping track of time. Some call it time blindness. I tend to imagine time as something elastic and malleable, and have been known to get frustrated by its refusal to bend to my own will.

Since I was 12, I’ve known my moods, my productivity, my sociability, my connection to myself and to the world - how deeply I need to retreat into myself, how extroverted I am - ebb and flow.

Therefore it has, for most of my life, been a constant source of annoyance that I was expected to maintain a smooth equilibrium from one work week to the next. To exist in linear, progression industrial time, that is neatly divided. Expected by others, but also, mostly, by myself. Yet I instinctively knew what I couldn’t manage in the fallow week I’d more than make up for in the weeks of energy and engagement.

As an undergraduate, I took a class called Space, Time and Infinity as part of my philosophy degree. Our lecturer was the perfect stereotype of a British philosophy professor and was so awkwardly captivating we gave him standing ovations. What I most clearly remember learning in that semester is that Scottish philosopher John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart argued that time does not exist! It doesn’t exist!

The specifics of his logic are lost to me now, but ever since that lecture I’ve realised it is okay to think about time differently, aware of how our division of time into segments of seconds, minutes, days, weeks and years is partly governed by planetary rotations, but is also sometimes arbitrary. That ideas of temporality shifted with industrialised time, which we have been socialised to use to understand and narrate our lives.

Kalachakra (‘wheel of time’) mandala,

All time is contingent. And we often live within overlapping temporal registers.

If I hadn’t truly realised that before, I definitely came to understand this when I had a small baby to look after.

Time is everything in those early days. Time stops. Time races. Time disappears. Time envelopes. Time discards. Time reassures. Time warns. Time imposes. Time mocks. Time encourages.

Count the minutes of a feed and the hours in-between; work back to calculate how much or how little sleep we got; chart the baby’s weight gain day by day. Sleep, feed, change, repeat.

There is clock time, that marches on. And there is a different kind of time. They are the same. And they are impossible to reconcile.

What does it mean to live in time and to give time?

Conway and Young, Milk Report, 2019, Laser and Riso printed publication.

No matter how much I leaned into the cyclical rhythms of motherhood, life in the twenty-first century crept back in, with its own temporal demands. When researching MILK, I spoke with women who described burdens of existing across multiple temporalities. The clock-watching, diary-filled, email-checking alarm clock time of the post-industrial world. Ruled by mechanised time. Which contrasted sharply with the slow, regularly irregular and often cyclical rhythms of parenting.

The return to paid work is having to live within at least two temporal registers simultaneously, without letting one negatively impact the other. In an ‘ideal’ situation, one should not even know about the other; colleagues should never be made aware of parental temporality, of pumping milk in toilets, of hourly night feeds.

Robbie Pfeufer Kahn termed this latter temporality ‘maialogical time’. She uses this term to refer specifically to the times of pregnancy, birth and lactation.

Maialogical time is a temporality of mutuality, inter-relatedness, interaction and reciprocity. It is a slower time, closely connected to bodily rhythms.

By contrast, Pfeufer Kahn describes linear time as

inhabited by individuated western man who follows the linear trajectory of history, a trajectory considered to be healthy [ .... ] it's sociability is based upon the collective activity of "autonomous" individuals frequently in competition with one another, or working for the benefit of someone else at the expense of the self.

Lactation is one concrete example, which in maiological time is akin to a series of mini-menstrual cycles, with hormonal fluctuations that ebb and flow from feed to feed. But there are countless other ebbs and flows that occur within one sunrise to the next.

I cried when I read Pfeufer Kahn’s work - grateful that something I was learning in my bones. Living within/ between multiple temporalities is perhaps one of the biggest challenges of motherhood.

We loose ourselves within the elastic morass of time, but we are not granted the grace to get lost in the time-warping, cyclical rhythms of it all.

What would it be to mother without a clock? To release ourselves from the grasp of those two sharp hands that govern and hold us in time, move us to their own steady beat?

There are rhythms of course. But how far can we lean into them?

What does it mean that the bookends of our lives are often gendered as female, from the womb to burial in Mother Earth?

How do we talk about time and what language is available to us?

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