Clocks Aren't Living Things.
Families are.
Something’s wrong with all the clocks in this house. Digital, analog…doesn’t matter. Mostly they thrum forward in precise and measured meter. Sometimes, they don’t.
Bam. Suddenly there’s a lurching like wildness and all the hour hands begin racing around, careening forward into history. I notice how fast I’m losing time, watch it drain away like the morning’s creamed coffee down a stainless-steel drain. The frantic rounding of the hour hands would edge ever-outwards if it could, an energy that would challenge the strength of each centerpoint pin holding each clock-body together as an intact whole.
Clocks aren’t living things, though.
Families are.
One moment I’m languid on the couch, my 19-year-old with her laptop stretched out beside me as we carefully select a set of sheets, an ottoman, the “perfect” mirror and a small, cute trashcan for her college dorm room. Next thing you know I’m upright in moonlight, laying behind the beat and trying real hard to play it cool.
“Have fun, be safe! Oh—and why don’t you text me what time you think you’ll be home?”
Does she even hear me as she’s lunging out the door, a friend at her side, her phone in hand?
“Be home at 11:30,” she writes a few hours later.
Gratefully I read her text, then glance at the clock. The front door will open, and she will return. The hours resume their normal cadence, but I know it is only a matter of time before my little family tolerates once more the thrum and careening of all this growing-up business, so terribly centrifugal and ridiculously beautiful all at once, an organic inertia that arises innately to strain the force of “us” that has center-held our family for years.
I don’t like it.
My resistance is both ancient and contemporary, I know. My voice is that of yet another mothers’ voice speaking, sounding as it releases (nudges, on my own best days) a beloved fledgling out of its sturdy nest and into open sky.
It’s just that this child is my Miracle Baby I didn’t think I could ever have. She’s the baby girl I thought I’d never know how to mother. She’s the reason I learned to bake sourdough bread and homemade apple pies. She’s the reason I learned to ice-skate in my 50s. This child – “a legal adult” (she corrects me often!) – this young person is my road-trip d.j., my lead voice with a thumb’s up microphone, my beloved, pure harmony on all the songs we love and sing together.
“Mommy? I just feel like you’re my other half,” she told me softly, seated in the passenger seat a month ago after returning home from her first all-on-her-own, self-funded trip to Hawaii with her best friend.
This child and I are close.
Our next family roadtrip begins in less than two weeks. Daughter, husband and I will make our way across the Nevada desert in one long day as we head to college in Salt Lake City, Utah.
My daughter will leave behind the redwoods, her tuxedo cats, her Holland Lop bunny, her daddy and her mommy.
This young woman will gain her autonomy – freedom to stand sturdy and wildly happy on a pair of skis; freedom to laugh so hard she pees. Freedom to scribble notes furiously as her professor talks too fast in class. Freedom to complain out loud that dining hall tacos don’t taste at all like the tacos she makes at home.
Our daughter’s asleep in her bed as I write this. My husband is tidying the kitchen, tiptoeing a bit as I cocoon on the couch—my laptop on my lap, our cat on the ottoman behind the portable heater.
The clock on the windowsill says it’s 17 minutes past the hour. Soon I’ll be working, meeting grownups from across the country to share their creative joys, challenges, progress and discoveries with each other and with me online. I’m their coach, their guide and their creative companion.
For this moment though, I am simply here.
While all the while the hours go round.
Round, go the hours.
Round, go the hours.
“Ocean of Another Sort,” © 2026 Marla Beck.