I saw the faces of those little boys who aren’t here anymore, the ones who lived with me in the dreamtime of early childhood.
—Caitlin Flanagan
Every parent’s deepest fear is losing their child. And the terrible, beautiful tragedy of parenthood is that, indeed, we are constantly losing our children. Day by day by day.
Not literally, of course, but in the sense that they are growing, changing, becoming something new, something more independent. On a daily if not an hourly basis. Professor Scott Galloway has talked about the profound grief he felt looking at an old picture of his eleven-year-old. Yes, it was true that his eleven-year-old was now a great fourteen-year-old, but the eleven-year-old was no more.
Such is our fate. Such is the life we signed up for. We want them to grow. We can’t wait for them to start walking, to start school, to experience all the wonderful things that life has in store for them. Yet this also means that they’ll never again be what they are right now—that what they are right now is ephemeral and fleeting for us at best.
Blink, get distracted, take it for granted? It’s gone. You’ve missed it.