When they grow up

It was a summer evening, and I was home from college. My father and I were taking a walk together through my parents’ neighborhood when we saw a mother and her little girl—maybe 6 or 7 years old—walking on the other side of the street.

My father waved, and the woman waved back.

“Look!” my father called out. “We’re both out for a walk with our little girls.”

It was so sweet, and that moment has stayed with me for years.

You’re always a child in your parents’ eyes. I think of that sometimes when I look at my sons, who are growing so quickly. One is already my height and moving past me, and his younger brother will be there soon enough.

I love watching our children grow. I am thrilled to see them achieve milestones, and I find them absolutely fascinating as they get older and grow in and out of interests. Every age so far has been my favorite.

But sometimes I look at our sons, and I can’t believe how quickly the time has gone. It really is flying.

Tomorrow our fifth grader will graduate from elementary school. We’ll close the book on one bizarre school year, and we’ll say goodbye to our amazing school. I look back on the day when we started there, back when I was full of nerves and concerns about whether our sons would thrive in this new setting. But they did.

And now he’s off to middle school with his big brother.

“They grow so fast,” people used to say to me. And I believed it was true. But I sort of thought maybe they meant other people’s children, not mine. Yet here we are, and I’m like my father, walking next to my teen and tween, wondering how we arrived here so quickly. I catch glimpses of parents with toddlers and remember that we were just there, talking about potty training and the best playgrounds in the area and how to teach a child to ride a bicycle.

In a couple of years, our fifth grader will be taller than I am. And I’ll still be mystified at where the time went.

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