I’m convinced time doesn’t move at a consistent speed.
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The Smashing Pumpkins said “time is never time at all”, suggesting it’s essentially calculated by things that happen — the evolution of things; the transformation, not just a ticking clock keeping a dependable beat.
When I had babies and toddlers, people would say to me, “Enjoy every moment, it goes so fast.”
It’s hard to believe them when you’re in a perpetual cycle of sleepless nights, knee-deep laundry, dirty nappies and unjustified tantrums.
But then, all of a sudden, you have an adult child and a severe case of whiplash.
How is this wee babe of mine allowed to drive a motor vehicle unaccompanied?
How is this tiny child allowed to walk into a bottle shop and buy a bottle of spirits and go home and shoot it if he wants?
How is this infant allowed to gamble, vote, go to nightclubs, take weekends away with his mates without any adult supervision?
Because, Mumma, he is an adult himself now.
It’s a hard concept to fathom.
While I feel it sped dizzyingly, the final few weeks of his ‘childhood’ dragged for him.
We had many an amusing, albeit pointless, hypothetical conversation in the lead-up to his birthday.
One night, he appeared by my side in the kitchen.
“Was I born on my due date or was I due earlier?” he asked.
“No, you were 16 days overdue,” I answered, groaning internally as I remembered my fluid-filled cankles, my borderline pre-eclampsia, my breath-hitching sciatic pain, the undignified cervical stretch and sweeps.
He too groaned, but audibly; a frustrated groan.
“So I could have been driving already?” he asked rhetorically, with feigned disdain, teasing that it was my fault that he wasn’t yet licensed.
I told him not to blame me for being a stubborn little bugger, too comfy in his little one-bedwomb flat to get out by the big red date on his eviction notice.
“Trust me,” I said, “I’d well and truly had enough of being pregnant at that point, I wanted you out, too.”
I told him I tried everything, from bouncing on a gym ball, to taking raspberry leaf tea extract, to having lots of sex.
(If you want a hot parenting tip, that’s how you put an end to these kinds of cross-examinations with your offspring.)
It was almost like he’d been trying to find a loophole to build a case that would convince Births, Deaths and Marriages to bring the birthdate forward on his birth certificate.
Imagine how ripped off he’d feel if he’d been born on February 29 of a leap year.
I mean, I know it doesn’t work like that, but I’d probably still heckle him about it as though it did.
The next night, he questioned why we live in Victoria.
And then pondered out loud, pointing north, “It’s crazy to think if we lived just an hour that way, I could have been driving for a year already,” hinting at NSW’s age-17 legal driving age.
Patience, dear — now adult — child, is a virtue.
Parents have exercised patience their entire kids’ lives.
Nerve-racking first steps, procrastination-filled potty training, long nights of unexplained high temperatures, avoidable broken bones, disrespectful backchatting, heartbreaking breakups, nail-biting driving lessons.
Yet everything still came and went too fast.
And here we are, at another crossroads; another phase; a new era.
My remarkable spawn emerges from his childhood cocoon into the adult world this week as a thoughtful and witty, helpful and hilarious human, among so many other wonderful things.
Whether that has anything to do with the way I raised him, or whether the world just got lucky he was born into it like that is beside any point.
What matters is that he is those things.
And I guess that’s why time flew with him; because he’s been a joy to parent.
Happy 18th to my firstborn son.