The summer he stopped holding my hand
It was a Tuesday in August, at a crossing near the supermarket, and he was six. He had held my hand at that crossing every week of his life. This time he put his hands in his pockets instead, and looked straight ahead, and we crossed the road like two people who happened to be going the same way.
I did not say anything. You do not get to say anything. The rule is that you act as though nothing happened, because making it into an event would humiliate him, and because on some level you understand that this is the correct direction of travel and your job is to be pleased about it.
I thought about it for weeks. Not the crossing itself — the one before it. There had been a last time he reached up and took my hand without thinking, and it had happened, and I had not noticed, and I have no memory of it at all.
Eighteen summers, and the useful ones are fewer
You have heard the number before, probably on a card or a poster: you get eighteen summers with your child. It sounds like a lot when they are small and the days are long and you would trade a limb for four uninterrupted hours.
The number is also generous. The first two or three summers your child will not remember, though you will. Somewhere around thirteen or fourteen they begin to have their own summer — friends, a job, a phone, plans that do not include a car trip with you. So the summers where they are old enough to remember and still young enough to want to come along number about ten. Maybe twelve if you are lucky and slightly annoying about it.
If your child is six, you have around seven of those left. Seven. You can picture seven of something. That is what makes the number dangerous and useful at the same time.
What childhood actually costs
I want to be careful here, because there is a genre of writing about parenthood that exists mainly to make tired people feel worse, and I have no interest in adding to it. Nobody is present every minute. You will spend a good portion of those seven summers dealing with a work emergency, or a sick parent, or a roof, or your own bad mood. That is not a failure of love. That is having a life.
But it is worth knowing what the summers are for. Not for the big trip. The big trip is nice and children mostly remember the swimming pool at the hotel. What they remember at thirty, when they describe their childhood to someone they are falling in love with, tends to be smaller and stranger: a particular sandwich, the way you sang badly in the car, a night you let them stay up because the moon was doing something.
Those things cannot be scheduled, but they can be made more likely. They happen in unstructured hours, the ones that feel wasted while they are happening. Protecting a few of those hours is most of the job.
The last times arrive without announcing themselves
There is a last time you carry them to bed. A last time they climb into your bed at two in the morning because of a dream. A last time they want you to come to the school thing, a last time they ask you to explain something instead of looking it up.
None of these come with a warning. That is what makes them different from the first times, which are photographed and dated and put into albums. The lasts pass in ordinary clothes, on a Tuesday, next to a supermarket.
You cannot catch them all. What you can do is stop treating the current version of your child as permanent. The six-year-old who wants you to watch him jump off the same step forty times is not a fixed feature of your household. He is a phase with an end date, and the end date is unmarked, and he will be replaced by someone else you will also love, who will not do that.
For the parent whose child is already twelve
If you ran the number and got three, or two, I know what the temptation is. You want to make the remaining ones enormous. Big holiday, big gesture, a summer they will never forget.
In my experience that does not work, and the reason is simple: adolescents are allergic to being managed. What does work is availability. Being in the kitchen at eleven at night when they wander in. Driving them somewhere, because a car is the only place a teenager will talk, since they do not have to look at you. Saying yes to the friend sleeping over even though it means no sleep.
The last summers are not about extracting memories. They are about being reachable while they are still in the house.
Count it once
Work out how many summers you have left. You will not enjoy it, and you should do it anyway, because it will change what you say yes to this year.
My son is eleven now. He walks a step ahead of me in the street, deliberately, so that we are not walking together in any way that a classmate could observe. Occasionally, when he forgets, he falls back into step beside me. I have learned not to mention it. I just walk, and I keep my hands out of my pockets, and I take the long way home.