Lucy's Big Milestone

Newsletter 2023-04-28

My kids are getting bigger. Why didn’t somebody warn me? I had no idea that children grow up. Childhood lasts a million years and is also over in the blink of an eye. Both of those things can be true at once—and, no, I’m not implying that it was a million-year eye blink. In moments where all four of my girls are screaming at each other after I just grounded them for screaming at each other, it seems like they’ll never reach adulthood. I don’t just mean that they’ll be immature forever. It’s possible they might gang up and eat each other before any of them reaches age eighteen. That’s what the crayfish did in my eight-year-old’s classroom. It seems like a timely warning. With sisters, it’s best to never sleep too deeply. A sibling is both your greatest ally and the chief suspect should you ever mysteriously go missing. Keep your cell phone’s location turned on just in case.

Other times, it seems like my kids are practically adults. I can leave them alone for hours at a time without any of them burning down the house. It’s a milestone I greatly appreciate. So does the fire department. My oldest goes on dates with boys. My second oldest does video chats with her friends to catch up on the latest gossip. The younger two know internet slang I’ve never heard of, despite the fact that I’ve been logging on since the days when you actually had to log on. That AOL dial up sound is imprinted on my soul. The kids can cook full meals and run the washer and dryer. They can fold laundry, too, even if they still can’t grasp the concept of putting away their clothes. No one knows what those large, empty dressers in their rooms are for. They were probably put there by the same people who built Stonehenge. The kids can even clean up after themselves, but only if I remind them repeatedly and also bring up unspeakable punishments. If you haven’t threatened to ground your kids for life today, are you even parenting? That’s not a hypothetical question. The answer is “no.”

Even with all these warning signs that my children won’t stay children forever, every once in a while, a huge milestone springs up out of nowhere and catches me completely off guard. That’s what happened this week. My second youngest, Lucy, is eight going on thirty. It breaks my heart, but after this, I’ll never be able to consider her a little kid again.