Time Wasting
My son turns eight in eight days. He says, “If your computer had a button you could press to go into labor, would you press it?” I say, “Yes. Would you?” He hesitates. “I would ask permission first.”
We read a German fairytale in which a one-eyed stepsister is torn limb to limb by wild beasts and an evil stepmother is burned alive. The heroes, brother and sister, live happily together until their deaths of natural causes. My son says, “Nice.” We read another German fairytale about a baby born half boy, half hedgehog whose parents stash him behind the stove. My son vows never to stash his sister behind the stove.
When my son wants a snow day, he flushes ice cubes down the toilet and sleeps with a spoon beneath his pillow. He asks if I ever did the same. I remind him I’m from the west coast and he says, “They have toilets there.”
We watch Paddington and my son doesn’t understand why the bear has an English accent before he gets to London. We watch Groundhog Day and my son whispers at Bill Murray to “rob a bank already.” We watch a Welsh film about a racehorse and my son sobs when the horse breaks a leg. We watch Flicka and my son sobs when the horse is sold to a rodeo clown. We learn these are the only two films made about horses, no matter how many you see.
In the kitchen my son puts his cold, wet hands on my stomach and says, “Your body kind of scares me.” I tell him it scares me too.
My son’s grandparents come over and give him birthday presents. A leather-bound diary. A Cuisinart popcorn maker. A purple watch that tells the time down to the second. Afterward his dad takes him ice skating and our son becomes preemptively distracted by the Zamboni, wanting to know if the machine will interrupt his skate time. He interrupts his own skate time to ask a staff member the same question. When the Zamboni slides onto the ice, other children cheer and wave. My son shouts, “Waster-boni! Because you waste everyone’s time!”
At his riding lesson my son watches his instructor canter around the ring. My son watches a seventeen-year-old girl on a horse the way his father watched Vince Carter dunk.
My son comes home from school mad because they played bingo again. I say, “But you win prizes and stuff. You love prizes.” My son confesses that he has never won bingo. I ask if he’s sure he’s playing correctly. He says, “Not totally, no.”
I find my son at the table with his head in his hands. I ask him what’s wrong and he says, “I’m waiting for my whole life to change.”
We watch popcorn spew from his new popcorn maker and my son says, “What do you like better? A thunderstorm or a popcorn storm?”
When I get mad at my son he averts his eyes and thinks about horses. This makes me madder.
I am on my knees in the living room trying to open my pelvis or fool my cervix. Some position some Bay Area doula YouTuber told me to assume. I say to my son, “Will you flush an ice cube down the toilet to make me go into labor?” My son squints at me in profound confusion. I am not who he thought I was. “Why would that work?” he asks.
