On how the quick movement of time feels when your children grow up
Or how to stop feeling guilty about the passing of time when you are a parent
People often say that parenthood moves very rapidly but I don’t think this is always true. The speed with which time passes as a parent is also something that we often feel guilty about - young mothers, wide eyed with exhaustion and the psychic confusion which this massive rearrangement of life brings with it, are often, often berated by their elders to enjoy those days, they pass so fast. And I still feel annoyed when I think of that stupid thing that goes around social media at this point in the year, telling parents (mothers) that this is one of the 18 precious summers of their child’s life, so make every moment count.
It is of course true that becoming a parent, from the moment of pregnancy, certainly makes you count time in a way you might not have experienced before: the three month scan, making it to week 38, your 40th week due date, three days old, three months old 9 months, a year, 18 months and now you are three! You are five! Look at you, ten years old! You’re 12, you’re thirteen - a teenager! And now 16, now 18, you’re 21.
I haven’t counted the days of my own life like I’ve counted and celebrated the moments and years of my children’s lives, and since my eldest son Jimmy is now almost 24, I’ve been counting time for almost a quarter of a century - and as Marilyn Monroe said in the best film of all time (which has absolutely nothing to do with parenting but must be watched several times in life, many, many times, ideally) Some Like it Hot “Quarter of a century - that makes a girl think.”
So time does move fast, but in reality, there were times when Dolly and Jimmy were small and then growing into adolescents when the rhythm of my days with them often seemed unchanging. There were big things that happened between us - we moved to a new house, their younger siblings were born - but the texture of how we lived remained constant. I remember, very very clearly, standing in the kitchen at our home in Oxfordshire, about six years ago, when Jimmy was about 17, Dolly was about 14 and Evangeline, Dash and Lester where about 1, 3 and 5, a tangled mass of noise and stickiness and fuzzy hair and grubby t-shirts, moving around us, and thinking, this time feels unending.
This was a beautiful, and truly exhausting, thought at that time. Because then the immediate future did indeed stretch out, full of young adolescents and young children, unending. Or, if not unending, at least for the next five years, and who can really think further ahead than five years?
But then life changes. Sometimes it happens in big moments, those times when the tectonic plates of life shift and move in a very obvious, physical way, because of the changing circumstances of life which you create and welcome into your life, or which happen to you and you cannot resist: you get offered a job in a new city you never dreamed of moving to; you realise that the divide between you and the person you’ve shared your life with isn’t just ‘something you’re going through’ but the reason you have to leave; the mother you imagined would always be there dies, taking all your past with her; you have a baby and then realise the woman you were before that baby came to you has entirely changed and won’t be coming back.
And then there is the change that happens mysteriously, absolutely, when you’re looking but not seeing.