Time and Growing Children

It's a commonplace amongst families that the time of a child's growing-up seems to have passed so quickly, once they are young adults, even though it can seem to last for ages during their childhood.

So we want to preserve their appearance, their delightful sayings, their innocent essence. We click away with our cameras and videos, and we store hundreds and hundreds of photos.

Parents often say with regret that they want to preserve their delight at childish utterances, facial expressions, happy days. "The time is passing," we say, "I don't want it to go," even though we know we will value their growing whilst it happens, at every stage. We can't, and we wouldn't want, to freeze time as in a photo. We know really that life is growth and change.

We know in our hearts that however many photos we take, this preservation can't actually be done. It is wonderful to have some photos to look back on as we grow older. But we are looking at them in the present moment every time we do so, and re-constructing our memories even whilst we "revisit" them. (Memory is not a static set of files waiting to be revisited, the neuroscientists tell us.) 

It is their transience that makes childhoodisms so uniquely delightful, and I think in our hearts we know this, as we focus, for example, on a grandson opening a birthday card. I still quote childhood sayings from our daughters. Here are a few recent Leoisms:

(to his brother): "Your feet smell of stink." 
(to his grandfather, first thing in the morning) "Where have your eyes gone Grandpa?"
(and my favourite, on a walk which was clearly a bit too long for him): "I've runned out of strong."

We treasure such, we carry them forward down the years for all our family - and it's their transience that makes us treasure them.