The early impression of parenthood is that it is comprised of always being on duty to keep small humans alive, fed, and moderately clean. As the kids get a bit older, transportation duties are added to this.
And to be fair, there is an awful lot of this.
But as the older kids move into adulthood, I think a deeper sense of what parenthood it comes into view.
A typical evening lately might range from taking one or two younger kids to activities, cooking and serving a dinner for 7-10, trying to get the youngest two kids engaged in something other than begging for screentime, hearing about the activities or workday of teens, getting those kids not yet old enough to put themselves to bed to head upstairs at a reasonable time, discussing some financial or personal issue with one of the adult kids, and Mom and Dad trying to somehow get a little time together as a couple.
When the kids were younger, everything moved more as one family machine: get everyone up, make sure everyone eats breakfast, have everyone do schoolwork, take everyone to activities.
The younger end of our distribution is more spread out: 7, 11, 14, 16 -- all different stages of life and development -- and among the adults, despite the closer spacing there is working-before-college, college, and post-college.
The result is that it is more than ever apparent that our duties as parents do not consist of moving around an amorphous blob of children. Rather, we sit at the intersection of many lives.
Some need guidance and help in their fledgling adult lives.
Some are working through those last years of semi-dependence before becoming adults.
And some still have many years of growth ahead before they will be stepping off to lead their own lives.
But all of them are separate human lives, bound inextricably to ours through our shared family, yet by tethers which become longer and more flexible with time. Eventually -- indeed, not so very far away -- they will begin to form their own families, even as they also remain part of ours.
I'm tempted to make some sort of astronomical analogy, but although multi-star systems can have planets, they tend not to be stable. Perhaps that's some indication of how each new family needs the distance to be self containing, even while remaining part of the larger system. After all, gravitational pull reduces according to the square of the distance.
But this sense of living at the crossroads of many different lives has been the dominant one in parenthood for the last year or two.