One of the things parenting changes irrevocably is your relationship with time. Not just because you value time more and have less of it than you’ve ever had in your life, but because how you measure it seems to change as well.

Before you had children, a month was a long time…and a year was an eternity. Your accomplishments would be legion with that many days to yourself. But now look at you–you have an eleven year old. You’ve been doing this–whatever “this” is–for eleven years. Somehow it still feels like you’re totally new at this while at the same time feeling like you’ve been doing it forever.

One day, you wake up and you realize that your youngest is now the age that their older sister was when they were born. Or that your pandemic baby is now a toddler. Or that they’re now the same age you were when your parents retired, or got divorced, or moved.

As we’ve said, tempus fugit. Time flies.

But it sneaks up on you. Worse than that, it sneaks past you. Not because it’s stealth, but rather because we’re too busy to notice its passage. We’re overwhelmed by the day-to-dayness of the job that is parenting.

We have to slow down. We have to understand that time isn’t just flying, it’s flying away from us.