Dear Lorraine,

How are you? Or maybe I should ask, when are you? Haha, nah, just a little time travel joke. But seriously, I hope everything is good and chronological, and that you are residing comfortably in the timeline where Biff washes your car.

Even though decades have passed since your kids were babies (two decades? Or is it six? Whatever, time is relative), I wonder how well you remember what it was like. How well do you remember those years when you had babies attached to you like brambles?

The youngest of my three kids is now five years old, a milestone that felt like crossing an enormous life-changing threshold, but I still remember viscerally how I felt during the baby years. They were a relentless cycle of waking up, changing diapers, feeding, and entertaining something that could never be sated. I’ll go out on a limb here and call the years when I had babies the worst years of my life, as I marinated in stress, exhausted, weighed down by a diaper bag, and trapped in a never-ending present that refused to forge ahead. It’s like my babies were a bolt of lightning that left my life hovering in the silence of a broken clock tower that couldn’t tick to the next minute.

I remember it all the way down to my bones, but what I remember most about those days is how often people looked into my sleep-deprived eyes and said, “You’ll miss these days.” If I had a dime for every time someone told me “You’ll miss these days,” I wouldn’t even need to lift plutonium off terrorists, because I could afford enough to generate 1.21 gigawatts of electricity every day for the rest of my life.

Part of me gets why people say it. I feel a pang of sadness when I see pictures of my kids as babies, and I can’t help but think, I wish I appreciated them more in that moment. The photos and videos remain clear, their little shiny-eyed cartoon faces and impossibly squeaky voices, but for some people, I think the memory of reality starts to fade away. They begin to forget what it’s like to be alone with a baby, all day every single day, and how lonely and thankless it is. But not me. Great Scott, I remember everything.

Would you go back if you could, Lorraine? Set that dial to 1960-something and go back to a time when you had your three babies crawling all over you? Something happened to you between 1955 and 1985, and it changed you. You went from a carefree and mischievous girl, sipping milkshakes and parking with boys you plucked out of trees, to a tired, beaten-down middle-aged woman with an oddly lumpy face. I know life wears you down, but I blame the babies most of all.

Because I’ve changed too. If I buckled my son into a DeLorean, cranked it up to eighty-eight miles per hour, and shot him back to my senior year of high school in 2003, I wonder if he’d even recognize me. Low-rise jeans and bedazzled baby tees aside, would he recognize the teenager with the loose-limbed confidence as his uptight mother? Would he recognize my face without the permanent line I frowned into the space between my eyebrows when he and his sisters were babies? Would he recognize it without the odd lumpiness?

I did the best I could during those baby years, but it’s clear I’m more suited to the older years. I have more patience for these crazy kids and their Roblox and Minecraft and “Johnny B. Goode” than I ever had for board books. If I had a choice between following a toddler slowly around a petting zoo with that stupid diaper bag sliding off my shoulder and giving a tween the sex talk, I’m busting out my copy of Gray’s Anatomy and flipping to the dog-eared page with the ballsack diagram (some people might not be ready for that yet, but their kids are gonna love it).

My main concern when I see those pictures of them as the beautiful little Muppet Baby versions of themselves is that I was too tired and miserable to have loved them enough. My big fear is that I was too strung out on cortisol to be the mother they deserved. If I went back to the past, it wouldn’t be because I miss it. It would be because I want to correct it.

Here’s what I’d do:

  • Set the date to November 5, 2019, and return to the day two weeks after my third child was born, officially completing my family.
  • Real quick, put all my money into hand sanitizer stock.
  • Hug my kids so tight and tell them I love them, I love them, I love them, for as long as they’ll allow before they wriggle out of my grasp to do something insane like set the living room rug on fire.
  • Hop back in the DeLorean and hope to hell that sucker is nuclear because that’s about as much more of the baby years as I can take. I have to go back… to the future.
  • Peel out of there, leaving two flaming tire tracks in my wake.

I mean it when I tell you, from where I’m standing—in my house at the window, waving goodbye to my kids as they get on the bus that will take them to school for the next seven hours—I don’t miss those days at all. Nope, I’m happy here in the present. Elementary schoolers are fun! They can ice skate, sit quietly for a Broadway show, cut their own hot dogs, and play on these things we call “hoverboards” that aren’t actually hoverboards.

I don’t want to go back. I don’t need time travel. The only thing I find interesting about a flux capacitor is how closely it resembles an IUD. Let’s keep moving forward, Lorraine, one tick tick tick at a time. Because where we’re going, we don’t need diaper bags.

Until next time,
Kristen