Three Books on Divorce, Step Parents, and the Nature of Time

So much of time with children is about the endless attempts we make as adults to lose ourselves in their worlds. How can we play side by side immersively, enter the infamous “flow” of things, such that time disappears? Why is this boundary to losing ourselves alongside our children sometimes so permeable, sometimes as impenetrable as a brick wall? When my youngest son was even younger, he wanted to play a game he called simply “Goat.” It went like this:

My son: Mummy, say “Goat, do you want to fly your helicopter?”
Me: "Goat, do you want to fly your helicopter?"
My son, as goat: "No."

Again! my son cried. Again, again! What, *what* was the appeal of this game? I would, after some time playing this game, want to convince my son get goat to say yes. Just this one time, I would want to say, couldn’t goat just fly his helicopter? What was the point of a helicopter if it did not fly?! These questions did not interest my son. I would regularly have almost an out-of-body experience of the slowness of time passing while playing Goat. I would look at the clock: 9:18. And again: 9:21. And again: 9:22. As Heidi Julavits says: “So much of the pleasure of hanging out with children is successfully losing yourself, if only for a minute or two, in the activity with which you’re both engaged.” Julavits’ brilliant book The Folded Clock, about time, parenting, and something else that I want to call the impossibility of appreciating life just when you should be, investigates how difficult it can be to lose oneself in an activity alongside one’s child. As Julavits says: “This necessitates the question: how can this day not mostly involve my waiting for it to be over? Yet when this day has ended my child will be older and I will be nearer to dead. Why should I wish this to happen any sooner than it already will?”

My neighbours and I often greet each other with the following: “Loving this time?” we say, archly, ironically. And truly, the pandemic has shifted the nature of time to me so much that the rhythm of a single day passing can seem almost unrecognizable from before. The pandemic has permanently altered so many things, and in its wake, time itself also seems to me irrevocably altered. In the spirit of waiting and Dr. Seuss, “waiting for the bus to come, or for the snow to snow. Everyone is just waiting” – I feel like we are waiting all the time: for the pandemic to be over, for the announcements to be made, for things to improve. “Stop and be grateful,” David Steindl-Rast would tell us in literally my favourite short film of all time (found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpkEvBtyL7M). Yes, yes, I want to! And yet, much like entering play, sometimes this seems more possible than others. Sometimes I am just not in the mood to enjoy life.

In the spirit of time and its altering, here are 3 children’s book on family breakdown, stepparenting, and what feminist critics like to call “temporality”, or the cultural politics of time.

Timeless Love
written by Julie Thompson, illustrated by Daria Lavrova

This book speaks to me deeply as a stepparent of a beloved stepchild as well as a stepchild of a beloved stepmother, and the challenging and beautiful nature of this bond. This book features a little boy named Alijah who lives with him mom. Alijah and his mom have lots of adventures together, and Alijah “loves these special moments with my mom. I love my mom and I know she loves me.” Enter mom’s special friend Jason. Jason is super fun. He plays tag, he barbecues, and he plays soccer for real. (As Alijah says about his mom’s soccer game: “She is a good player, but I have to take it easy on her. I don’t like to beat her all the time). And yet, although Alijah appreciates Jason’s skills, it is hard that Jason starts “showing up everywhere.” “When we go to the movies, Jason is there. When we go to a baseball game. Jason joins us.” To Alijah, “it seems like all the special moments I used to have with my mom are gone. I do not like it at all. The next time I see Jason, I growl at him like a tiger.” Am I not as special as her special friend, Alijah wonders? Although Alijah’s mom tries to explain that she likes spending time with Alijah and Jason too, things escalate, until Alijah is feeling something inside of him “and I don’t know how to explain it to mom. We used do the dishes together and now she is doing them with Jason. My insides feel sad but I am too angry to let mom know so I stay quiet.” Until all the words pour out at once: “Now that you have Jason, one day you won’t want to spend time with me. I am afraid you will stop loving me.” Explaining that her love for Alijah will never change, Alijah’s mom gives the example of spending time with different people. If you could only spend time with one friend, wouldn’t you miss the others? Suddenly, Alijah understands: “Mom’s love for me will never stop growing no matter how much time she spends with her friends. Her love for me is “timeless”.

In a trying day that began with some growling and ended in many heartfelt declarations of rage, one of my sons struggled to accept our changing family. “I miss it when it was just me and mummy,” he said, “I want it to change back again.” Yes, yes, I said to him. I understand. And although I tried the timeless line and although it seemed to be rejected, I thought I detected the smallest softening. Sometimes the smallest of softenings is enough, the universe seemed to be telling me. And in the spirit of love that is timeless, I offer up this book.

Weekend Dad
written by Naseem Hrab, illustrated by Frank Viva

Part of the reason I started this listserv is because I wanted families to have the books they needed in the shadow of the pandemic, and an important category to highlight is picture books dealing with family breakdown. There is a shadow pandemic of divorce and family reconfigurations happening in the wake of Covid-19, and my family too is folded into its waves. It is difficult for me for many reasons to write about Naseem Hrab and Frank Viva’s masterpiece Weekend Dad. It deals in part with time that must be divided as a result of family breakdown and its attendant anxieties. As it begins: “On Monday morning, my dad moved out of our house and into an apartment. . . . I packed a bunch of photos in my dad’s suitcase, so he wouldn’t forget us by the weekend.” The little boy is going to spend the weekend with his dad in the city. When his dad picks him up to take the bus into the city, he is so excited to tell his dad about the week’s adventures that the 48 minute bus ride feels like it lasts 3 seconds. When he arrives, he notes that this home is his home because his dad is there, and it is nothing like his home because his mom is not. While with his mom, the little boy wonders how his dad is spending his time, remembering or forgetting him? And while with his dad, he wonders all the time what his mom is doing. Did she go to the pool without him? In an interview I did with Naseem Hrab, she confessed that this dad, who is a little redeemed at the end of this book in the tradition of children’s books, is based on her dad. Her dad, like the dad in the book, did not buy his son a bed in time for him to visit. Weekend Dad end on a hopeful note – father and son are off to buy a bed together. And yet, as Naseem Hrab said to me, “what kid is excited to go buy a bed?” This book bravely, and with very few compatriots, tangles with the complex reality of the many dads out there who don’t do quite right by their kids. For all the children with various versions of Weekend Dads out there, this book is for you.

Forever or a Day
Sarah Jacoby

This book holds little interest for either of my sons. I, however, love it. It features lesbian moms without this being the central narrative, and in the tradition of many great picture books, it is a meditation on the philosophy of time (see also Time is a Flower). Forever or a Day tries to explain the passing of time, and this how might feel different depending on what you are doing. It gently calls us back to the moment without being preachy. Furthermore, since a feature of ASD is that time is a bit complicated to understand (and isn’t this true for all of us really?), a meditation on the nature of time and how changeable it can feel is helpful. “Sometimes, it’s far far away – like when you will be old, gazing out at the sea” and sometimes it’s “as quick as a heartbeat skip hello.”

You cannot hold it.
You cannot give it to someone
in exchange for a snack.
We’ve only got what we’ve got.
Whether it’s a drumbeat, a whisker twitch, lost or found -
I love the time I have with you.

And doesn’t that capture it, really? Whether slow or fast, excruciating or joyous, so too do we love the time with have with our demanding, challenging, and adored children.

I spoke today with a treasured friend about the beauty of children’s logic (it too a moment in time, before it is lost to the world of adult reasoning). I was reminded by this conversation of my favourite ever commentary at an art museum. It was an exhibit of Van Gogh, and at the end there was a place for visitors to leave notes as to whether they’d liked the exhibit. They were pinned to a bulletin board, which contained the usual laudatory adult comments: “So beautiful, so magical, thanks for a lovely afternoon.” But the one that has stayed with me was written by a child in child printing. It said simply: “Next time, I would like to see more tigers.”