My Google calendar still dings on our anniversary.

My husband left when my son was two. My toddler’s pudgy cheeks and dimpled fingers didn’t understand the cycle of a twenty-four-hour day. He thought every time he woke from a nap was a new day. My son, who could not pronounce most words correctly, asked me a dozen times a day if he would see Daddy today. I would hold my breath and ride the waves of emotions with every “No, not today.”  

How do you teach a toddler about the passage of time? How do we learn the passage of time? Visually, I suppose. Plans spilled out over the outlined squares of a calendar. Wrinkles appear and deepen on a face and across hands. The yearly changing of the Christmas card mailing list—take his name off; they aren’t married anymore, don’t forget to remove the neighbor who passed away this year. Have they moved? Cross that one out; we aren’t really friends with them anymore. 

Two is too young to understand the twenty-four-hour cycle. Sometimes I think thirty-two is too young as well. Clothing kept going out the door with my husband, instead of coming back in. A whole frozen chicken came once, a work gift. “Would you like it?” he asked. No, not really. But I’ll save it for a future celebratory dinner on a day your clothes walk back in the house and we close the gap on the time you’ve been gone. That damn chicken sat in the freezer for the passing of months, haunting me, until I finally gave it back to him. Sometimes you count time as before and after a frozen chicken.

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