I have been traveling—away from my kids for about five days. Over the weekend, Alex sent me photos he took of them and they looked HUGE—Bea especially. Suddenly, she looks on the cusp of adolescence. So big, so fast. How could this have happened? If I blink, will they suddenly be in college?  Last week, holding a friend’s 8-week old baby in New York was another reminder of how much they’ve grown – how much we’ve changed as a family. “It must seem like you were here just yesterday,” said my friend as she breastfed baby Juniper. “Actually, no. It feels like eons ago.”

Eons since I grappled with a stroller. Eons since I fretted over the meaning, or lack thereof, of an infant’s tears. Eons since breast milk bottles sat upside down next to the sink, cleaned and ready to be used again. Eons since I’d dealt with that weird yellow poo that stains the backsides of newborns’ onesies.

Eons. That’s also how I felt when I opened this photo of my dad with Bea and Thomas. I was cleaning up my computer desktop and came across it, then had to do the math: Christmas four years ago. Four months before he died. I can parse the numbers so many other ways: Five and a half years after Bea was born. A year after Alex and I first separated. Forty years after my first Christmas with my dad. Nine months after he was diagnosed. Numbers. Irrelevant really. They’re easy to focus on, to stare at them and try to learn something from them. But like my kids’ current ages or weights or heights, they are irrelevant. What matters is the reminder – hard but in some ways incredibly sweet – that nothing stays the same, all is changing, every second.

I just got off the phone from talking with Alex. The divorce should be final this week, if all goes ok. Neither of us really understands the process, but we’ve each done our bit and there’s nothing left to hold it up. A four-month legal process. A 16-month process from separation to the final final. Or, do I start the clock on April 30, 1994 – the day we got married?

Math. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re now in a different space with each other – discussing our kids, his work, my work, our elderly dog. It’s a relationship that will continue as long as each of us is alive – be that four months, four years, or four decades. But its tenor, its purpose is changed. And I guess it will change again. And again. At some essential level, that’s ok.