They are me and I am them. And our once beautiful cocoon of one-ness, slowly starts to quietly loosen and fragment as time unforgivingly moves us on.

I recently read about a physics theory (there are various different theories about the same idea) that time is not linear and the past, present and future all exist at the same time. I won’t (and can’t) go into the scientific explanation of this theory, but what I did cling onto from this theory is that it means the past is not ‘gone’. The past still exists. A concept that I found hugely comforting.

The last couple of years my motherhood experience has been slightly clouded by a huge feeling of grief. Grief that my babies are no longer babies and that it all went so quickly. Feelings of regret of ‘did I make the most of it’ and wishing I could go back and do it all again.

For so many years it felt like I was trying to escape my life, in various different ways; until I became a mother. For the first time I didn’t want to escape my life anymore. I had finally ‘arrived’, at the same time my baby had, and I never wanted to ‘escape’ again. I wanted to stay, to be right here and for time to stand still.

What motherhood has given me is not only purposeful important work (caring for another person), but a connection to my true self I had lost for a very long time. My complete immersion into motherhood has been confronting, healing, transformational and deeply empowering.

Yet the ever present and growing sense of redundancy in this role of motherhood is getting closer. There is more physical ‘space’ between my sons now they are both at school and doing more activities outside of our home. So I try to close that gap desperately by making myself purposeful in other ways for them. A lot of my mothering looks and feels different to how it used to. It feels a lot like I’m listening more instead of asking questions and directing. I am helping with homework. I am watching. I am waiting for them to need me once again.

I’m realising that the places I used to go to so frequently with the children, will gradually lessen. Places I used to dread and hurry to leave, like the park, I will long for deeply. Pushing my child in a swing, slipping shoes onto tiny feet, lifting small bodies in and out of a car seat, holding their small hands. The physical helping and caring and nurturing of another person, gradually lessens.

I know in the future I will long for even the hardest of days we’ve had. To pick you up from school, to cook your sweet little tea, to give you a bath, to read to you, to hold your small tiny bodies as they fall asleep.

There is immense beauty ahead and already it hurts so much. The pain of knowing that all the endless love is to make it possible to let them go one day.