Fast takes forever

Written By Barbara Chen

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How does some thing that moves so fast

Also seem to take forever

A toddler getting out the door

… fed, changed…washed, clothed…brushed, packed…tackled buckled rushed rolled

A pregnancy, a birth

Borne of years of imprecise technology and a singular miracle

A breast pump reactivated

3 to 4 times a day

Seven days a week

For nine months

Or around 800 30-minute sessions

Not including the actual feedings

that helped create this thriving toddler

Who takes forever

yet moves so fast

= childhood and motherhood in tandem, tension and tenderest time

Barbara Chen

Barbara Chen is a nonprofit consultant and writer who has held major communications roles at the NYPD, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Columbia University. She currently co-directs “To Protect, Serve and Understand,” an empathy-through-improvisation training that convenes civilians and police in a multiweek workshop and public performance created by the Brooklyn-based Irondale Ensemble Project.

Formerly an ABC News producer and New York chapter vice president of the national Asian American Journalists Association, Barbara is an alumna of Columbia Business School's Police Management Institute, the Minority Writers Seminar hosted by the Freedom Forum Institute at Vanderbilt University and California State University Fullerton, where she was commencement speaker for the College of Communications in 1999, and inducted into its Alumni Wall of Fame in 2017.

Most of her personal writing and poetry prior to March 2021 lives at imbchen.wordpress.com.

https://iambarbarachen.com
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