Fourteen years between two children

There is a strange clarity that comes from raising a newborn while your first child writes her own code in the next room. The baby is asleep on my chest. The teenager is debugging something at her desk. They are 14 years apart. They are both mine. They are teaching me at the same time.

When Anagha was small, I worried about everything. I read every book. I tracked every milestone. I thought that if I cared enough, I could parent perfectly. I cannot tell you how much energy that mistake cost me. The good news is that energy comes back, eventually, and you spend it on the second child quite differently.

With Agastya I worry less. Not because I care less. Because I have learned that most of parenting is showing up, and most of the things that go wrong, you can repair. The repair is the parenting. The repair is what they remember.

The strangest part of having children 14 years apart is the perspective. I am holding the early years and the later years in the same week. The hand that rocked the cradle is the hand that signs a school permission slip. It does not feel like two seasons. It feels like one long, slow argument with time. And I am, finally, losing it gracefully.