Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is that truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actually speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny, perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later, he’s off to his senior year of high school. You give birth to twins so small and alike, they lie mirrored, each with a head in the palm of one hand while their toes reach only to the crooks of your elbows, but it’s only a year before they start looking at colleges. It is so impossible yet so universally experienced that magic is the only explanation. Except then there are also the excruciating rainy Sundays when the kids are whiny, bored, and beastly, and it takes a hundred hours to get from breakfast to bedtime, the long weekends when you wonder whose demonic idea it was to trap you in your home with your bevy of abominable children for a decade without school.
They were all of them, even Poppy, still little boys in Rosie’s eyes, never mind four-fifths of them were now eight-plus inches taller than she was with voices deep as wells. That was something she would explain to people about Poppy if she ever actually decided to explain to people about Poppy instead of keeping her a secret: your babies are always your babies. Roo and Ben were nearly six feet tall with limbs like giraffe legs and wingspans that augured flight. Fourteen-year-old Rigel appeared no more like baby Rigel, fourteen-year-old Orion like toddler Orion, than Poppy did like little Claude. But those tiny boys, those tiny bundles of baby, were right there before her every morning over breakfast and every evening over dinner and every time they woke up sick in the middle of the night or came home with some school miracle accomplished or ranged into moments of stumbling maturity. Poppy’s transformation, she would have told people, if she told people, was no more miraculous or astonishing or, frankly, absurd, than any of the others, nor any more apparent to her rainbow mama eyes. Parent time is magic: downtempo and supersonic all at once, witch’s time, sorcerer hours. Suddenly, while you aren’t paying attention, everything’s changed.
Poppy was about to start fourth grade, the twins ninth, Roo and Ben their junior years of high school. On the way to work, Rosie considered that she had only two more years with her whole tribe, and then she’d be down to three. She had only two more years—after a dozen of them—with a child in elementary school. Only two more Halloween parades. Only two more turkeys shaped like hands. She could scarcely imagine a holiday season without “Up on the Rooftop” stuck in her head, but she looked forward to trying it out. The weather was all turquoise sky, sunshine spread wide and warm like butter on new rolls, dappling shadows that somehow made clear it was the end of summer not the beginning, back to school not semester’s end.
They had a pediatrician of course. And a dentist. Jupiter had a vet, especially as her muzzle grayed and her hearing went and it took a full minute to get up from her bed for a walk. The twins had an orthodontist. Ben had an optometrist and an allergist. Roo had an orthopedist from the time he broke his wrist skiing the first winter after they moved, overconfident that his Wisconsin snow experience trumped his classmates’ rain, forgetting their Washington mountain experience trumped his Midwestern flat. Poppy, in the years to come, would have a whole host of ists and ologists. But Rosie and Penn stuck with Mr. Tongo.
They met with him online, rather than over the phone, so he could see their faces and they his and anything else he wanted to show them: to no one’s surprise, Mr. Tongo was a fan of the visual aid. He still favored his giant exercise balls over actual office chairs, and it gave Rosie and Penn the impression he was talking to them from a train, bouncing lightly up and down, rolling occasionally side to side. Then suddenly he would break off and rush about the room, in and out of the shot, on and off the screen, pulling books off shelves or models out of drawers or standing on the desk to make a point, even though that meant they could only see his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers.
This day, Rosie and Penn at first thought they’d clicked the wrong contact, for when they connected, the window opened onto what seemed to be a preschool classroom, pastel wooden alphabet blocks stacked into high-rises and skyscrapers, a city of wobbly block towers.
“Mr. Tongo?” Penn ventured.
No answer.
“Mr. Tongo,” Rosie called. All these years later, they still did not call him by his first name.
Still no answer.
“Is the Wi-Fi wonky?” Penn wondered. “Or maybe it’s a glitch on his end?”
“Disconnect and try again,” said Rosie.
Suddenly, they heard a roar. Godzilla lumbered into view. He lurched into one precarious building and another, turning all to ruin, before mounting one of the rubbled piles and facing the camera triumphantly. Around his neck hung a sign in Mr. Tongo’s neat block handwriting. It read: PUBERTY.
Godzilla was menacing enough until Mr. Tongo’s face loomed three times larger at his side looking ready to accept his Oscar nomination.
“Hi, Mr. Tongo,” Penn and Rosie chorused from somewhere between bemused and wary.
“It was me all along!” Mr. Tongo wiggled his plastic Godzilla as if they might need proof. “A monstrous welcome to us all.”
They smiled at him weakly. “How are you, Mr. Tongo?”