My kids are all adults and teenagers now, and in a bizarre Schrödingerian way, they’re still my children, but they’re no longer children.
Every day, my photos app automatically curates our memories in photographic form, which emphasises the existential weirdness of time passing. This morning, I was presented with images of my daughter strumming a full-sized guitar with half-sized hands; my son painting a canvas twice his height; and three excited pre-teens dwarfed by animatronic dinosaurs. The faces in these photographs belong to taller people now and – although a lot has changed – some things remain the same. As parents of grown children acutely understand, these everyday moments are the building blocks of our lives.
