This week my daughter officially turned two-and-a-half years old, which means she’s now closer to being five-years-old than she is to birth. I don’t know how to process that.
Lately every time I look at her I just hear The Steve Miller Band singing “time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future. (doo doo doo doo)”
Her vocabulary has exploded. She understands jokes. She’s formed her own free will and has an entire personality of her own.
We have conversations, which is crazy, because it means she’s really piecing things together.
Every single one of those things fills me with immeasurable pride but also carries a little bit of sadness and an undercurrent of panic.
Parenting a toddler is like watching the water crest then spill over the top of a clogged toilet before realizing there is no emergency shut off valve.
It doesn’t help that my son just turned six-months-old and we’ve started saying goodbye to things it feels like he should still need like the bassinet, newborn seat attachments, and a liquid-only diet.
How, with one kid in a booster seat and another in a high chair, am I suddenly the shortest person sitting at my dining room table?
It’s all just happening so fast.
Similarly, how is it that my cousin’s kid, who was born while I was in college, is now in college?
And that another cousin’s kid whose wedding I went to while I was in college, is starting college this month?
College used to be the pinnacle of adulthood but now it’s just a marking period that we might as well just round up to twenty. Which, through another cruel twist of fate, is now less than half of my age.
I’m worried that I’m running out of time.
Warning signs are everywhere from the leaves showing up in my pool to the sounds popping out of my knees every time I use the stairs.
I thought about contacting the guy who installed our bedroom floor to ask why the floors made so much noise before I realized it wasn’t the floor creaking when I wake up every morning, but me.
Even the moon is on it. It shifts from waxing to waning and from full to new in the blink of an eye instead of in the provided 28-30 days.
No sooner do I notice how big a full moon looks than the following day there’s barely any left. Every time I see the moon it’s shifted significantly more than it should have. The moon I grew up with took forever to turn full again.
I know because I tracked it for a while when I was a kid, which is exactly the sort of thing you do when you’ve got plenty of time to spare.
It’s said that time accelerates as you age.
If that’s true, I feel like Lucy Ricardo shoveling conveyor-belt chocolates into my chef’s hat, probably because I’m old enough to know that reference (even if only from reruns).
I now say things like “I can’t believe it’s already August,” or “how are we already halfway through June,” with the same predictable regularity that I used to say things like, “I’m SO BORED!” or “are we there yet!?”
It’s also said that when it comes to parenting babies or small children, the days are long but the years are short.
Truer words may never have been spoken.
What’s left unsaid, however, is how disorienting it feels comparing and contrasting the two.
At least the changing seasons have built-in reference points. What makes raising a child so disorienting is that I literally don’t know what to expect next.
I just know it’s coming, whether I’m ready or not.
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