I don't know if that's true for every parent, or if some of it is specific to those of us who had babies and toddlers during COVID, when the normal markers of time seemed to disappear. But sometimes I look at the years since my daughter was born and genuinely cannot understand how they went by so quickly.
Kyle and I started dating in 2012. We got engaged in 2013 and married in 2016, and I remember those three years feeling impossibly long.
Three years felt like an entire era.
We had so many things to look forward to. Getting engaged. Planning a wedding. Buying a house. Figuring out what we wanted our life together to look like. There were milestones in front of us, and each one felt like it was taking forever to arrive.
Then we got married, and three years later, in 2019, we had our daughter.
For some reason, those three years between 2016 and 2019 feel completely different in my memory. They feel like a lifetime ago. And yet 2019 to 2026 feels like it happened almost overnight.
Seven years.
My daughter went from being a baby I could carry around in one arm to a kid who is starting second grade. I can remember pieces of those years so clearly, but somehow the years themselves feel like they disappeared.
And when I actually think about everything that happened during that time, I understand why.
The year I was pregnant with her, my mom became seriously ill and nearly died. We were making trips downstate while I was pregnant, worrying about my mom while also preparing to become parents ourselves. Afterward, she continued to struggle with her health. She was falling in her apartment and eventually had to move into long-term care, temporarily.
My relationship with my mom changed during that period, too. After coming so close to losing her, we had some very difficult conversations about our relationship and some of the things that had been left unresolved between us.
Then our daughter was born.
And not long afterward, the entire world shut down.
We went through the COVID years with a baby and then a toddler. There were no normal routines to fall back on. Things that should have been simple became complicated. We watched our daughter grow through a period that felt both incredibly long while we were living it and strangely short when we look back on it now.
I eventually left my employer and spent a lot of time thinking about what I actually wanted from a job. I had to be honest with myself about what I was willing to commit to and what I wasn't.
I knew I wanted to be able to go to my daughter's school events. I wanted to be able to pick her up from school. I wanted weekends with my family instead of constantly feeling like work was competing with everything else in my life.
I eventually started a new job, and I genuinely love it.
I know that's not something everyone gets to say about their job, and I don't take it for granted. Having a job that gives me a reasonable work-life balance has made a huge difference in how I experience my life outside of work.
Kyle went through his own series of job changes during those years before eventually landing where he is now, too.
So maybe this isn't entirely about having a child.
Maybe it's about how much a person can change in seven years.
When I think about who I was before we got married, she doesn't feel like a completely different person, but she feels far away. The woman who was planning a wedding in 2016 had no idea what the next decade was going to ask of her.
She didn't know she'd become a mother.
She didn't know she'd be caring about school pickup times and dance schedules and whether there were enough snacks in the house.
She didn't know she'd spend years worrying about her mom's health.
She didn't know she'd live through a pandemic with a baby.
She didn't know she'd eventually leave a job, rethink what she wanted from her career, establish boundaries around her time, and find work that actually fit better into the life she wanted.
And that's probably why the years before having our daughter feel so much longer to me.
We were waiting for our life to begin.
We were dating, getting engaged, planning a wedding, buying a house, and imagining what came next. Each milestone was something ahead of us, so we noticed the time between them.
Now, I'm not waiting for the next version of my life.
And maybe that's why it moves so quickly.
One day you're bringing your newborn home, and then you're packing their backpack for kindergarten. Then suddenly they're losing their first teeth, learning to read, getting opinions about what clothes they want to wear, and asking if they can stay up another fifteen minutes.
The days can still feel long. Some of them feel very long.
But when I look backward, the years are incredibly short.
Maybe that's the strange thing about getting older and becoming a parent. You don't necessarily notice time passing while you're in it. You're too busy making dinner, going to work, paying bills, cleaning up toys, attending school events, figuring out childcare, managing family problems, and trying to make everyone else's life run a little more smoothly.
Then you look up and realize seven years have passed.
And your entire life has changed.
Maybe that's why the life we had before kids feels almost foreign to me now. It wasn't that long ago, technically. But so much happened between then and now that it feels like it belonged to another version of us.
Maybe time didn't actually speed up when we became parents.
Maybe we just started filling it with so much life that we stopped noticing it go by.
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