In Joshua Foer’s nifty new book about the art of memory, Moonwalking with Einstein, he says that memorizing connects us to an oral tradition in which the culture’s most valuable ideas weren’t written down but memorized. One of the main qualities of a good memorizer is the ability to look to the past. Surprise, surprise: Americans are notoriously poor at committing stuff to memory because we’re so focused on the future.

I’ll cop to being a stereotypical American in this respect. While I don’t think I’m an awful memorizer (want a Robert Frost poem, anyone? No?), I have been future-oriented all of my life—or at least since around 13 or 14 when I discovered the cause-and-effect satisfaction of earning good grades and managing my weight.

I sometimes think about what I’ve lost in this drive toward the future. Whole potential experiences, thoughts, and features of my personality have probably been lost, sink-hole-like. Some people are haunted by things they never accomplished. I’m haunted by time I didn’t waste when I should have.

This all to say that it has been challenging adjusting to having a baby. The loss of sleep and freedom are rough (this is a lot easier now that she’s almost a year), but I’m still a little perplexed by this new reality in which my own future is not only irrelevant but is actually an impediment to the process.

I’ll be sitting on the floor watching Bea turn a small object over in her fat little hands, or I’ll be dragging her out of the kitchen for the twentieth time, explaining that we can’t, however much we’d like to, stick our hand, wrist-deep, in cat food. While all this is happening in real time, I’ll feel like I’m being slowly erased, like small particles of me are being spun out into the air, diffused and gone. The experience is at once sweet, serene, and also kind of scary.

For the record, I hate the psycho-pop mandate to Be in the Now. Now makes no sense. Now is the stuff of nostalgia, an invention. There’s a stink diaper to be changed, and that’s not a now I want to live in.

Besides, everything I’m doing for Bea now is designed to move her into the future. I have to make sure she is fed and loved today so can exist tomorrow and the next day and on into the future, happy and undamaged. Just to prove what a little speed racer she is, her face keeps changing. She’s looking older. She keeps getting taller. The calendar keeps bossily informing me of her tumble routine into the future. I need to help her get there. It’s kind of like the way nature takes what it needs from the mother’s body and gives it to the fetus (traces of depletion in postpartum bones and teeth and hair). The future needs me less than it needs her. No surprise there.

So I help her move forward. I’m fine with that. I just need to figure out where that puts me in the meantime. I suppose it puts me in the meantime. Whatever that means.