Time Travel in the Dairy Aisle
A pint of ice cream, a brick of cheddar, and the strange way motherhood announces each new chapter
This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.
It all began at the dairy case, where a brick of cheddar stopped me in my tracks.
“Good through May 1, 2009.”
It wasn’t even New Year’s yet, and spring felt light-years away. More importantly, I hadn’t yet announced that I was pregnant, due with my first baby in mid-April. Those early days of pregnancy felt more like a hope and a prayer than a reality, and motherhood still felt abstract, something waiting in the very distant future.
Until the cheese.
The cheese seemed to know what I could barely trust: that it would stay good through the long winter and still be there by the time I became a mother. As my pregnancy progressed, the expiration dates on the items in my grocery cart reached further and further into the future, while my due date drew closer and closer.
My daughter arrived as planned in late April, dividing my life into a personal BC, before children, and AD, after daughter. Over the course of the last 17 years, there have been plenty of other divisions of before and after: solid foods, potty training, going to school and, most significantly, the addition of each of our two sons. I learned how to be a mother, and then how to be a mother of two and then three. For over a decade, we have faced hilarious ups and heartbreaking downs as a household of five, with me constantly learning on the job.
Now, that first baby has a junior prom dress hanging in her closet and a crisp new driver’s license in her wallet. (Just kidding, it’s in her Lululemon keychain wristlet, obviously.) And somewhere between the strep tests, permission slips, birthday parties and carpools, it makes sense that I had forgotten all about the brick of cheddar.
That is, until last week, when I checked the expiration date on a pint of ice cream: 2027.
When we registered my daughter for kindergarten, they gave her an enormous “Class of 2027” T-shirt, comical in both its size and its promise. At the time, 2027 conjured images of futuristic vistas and flying cars. Once again, a future that seemed light-years away is now knocking on our door, this time courtesy of a pint of butter pecan.
And though the ice cream itself will likely be finished before I finish writing this, its message endures. After graduation, it will be time for me to learn a new “after,” one in which our daughter pursues her next endeavor while we cheer for her, likely from a greater distance than we have ever known.
We are on the brink of a series of new chapters, one filled with the “lasts” I already know will come and go too quickly, followed immediately by another chapter of new “firsts” — for the one who made me a mother, and for me.
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