My eldest daughter is almost two and a half years old. She’s in fine toddler form:
- She likes Easter-egg hunts. She enjoys hiding colored plastic eggs in our backyard, and has even gotten pretty good at finding the ones she herself has hidden – she can usually get 5 out of 7 without help.
- She always negotiates on time. We’ll offer her ten more minutes of play until it’s bedtime, to which she counters, “No! FIVE minutes!”
- Her go-to insult is to label someone a “Booty Butt!” In our house, Booty Butts are the lowest of the low – referring to anyone this way is sure to crack her up.
Being the parent of young children is an exercise in conflicting feelings, as part of you is always ready for them to grow up; generally, their mere existence eliminates much of your adult independence, something which you’re always ready to get back no matter how much you love your kids. Yet what that return of autonomy is, by necessity, tied to is the aging and maturation of your children – something which you don’t feel so purely ready for. While parenting gets easier as your children get older, things also get different. You don’t get back who your kids are now. You’ll get more sleep, but you won’t sing them to sleep.
My wife and I already sit around and watch iPhone videos of our daughter, marveling over how radiant she was doing this or that – things which might very well have happened earlier that day. I’m already scared for how profound the nostalgia will be when we watch those same videos twenty or whatever years from now.
And what I find interestingly unique about children is that – unlike all the other nostalgia in your life – that pining back to an earlier time isn’t actually about the time-period, but instead about the person’s age. In this context, at least, I won’t be missing 2019 and 2020, when we lived here and were doing that and had these great times – I will more simply miss the two-year-old version of my daughter.
This is not something that you would project onto adults. You might miss the times you and your friends had in college, but nobody really misses the 20-year-old version of a person in comparison to the 30-year-old version of them now. That’s not how you would conceptualize your desire for something from long ago. While there are surely differences – they’re more responsible, they have different interests – they’re largely the same person, with the same sense of humor, the same mannerisms, the same morality, that they were a decade earlier.
This is not the case with young children. As much as I’ll love my twelve year old daughter, I’ll still miss my two year old girl.