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During Kindergarten orientation night, someone called our kids the Class of 2023, and I thought to myself how hard August 2023 would be. Thank G-d it was so far away.

But now it is here. The final month. The final weeks. Really, we’re down to the final days.

It is so weird to dread a month for so long. An event, yes. But a month — to have a date in your head for over a decade — is another story. You can see how far away it is on a calendar and watch it inch closer and closer until you are inside that calendar page. Inside those 31 days.

The mornings are the hardest. I have a few seconds when I wake up while my brain is untangling, and then I remember. And I feel so overwhelmingly sad. The nights are hard, too, when I’m about to go to bed, and I have time to think about it. The rest of the day is filled with work and distractions and tasks.

Apologies. I only have one thing to say lately.

The ChickieNob was going to the Barbie movie with a friend, and I was going to dinner with a friend a block away, so they caught a ride with me. It was nice to drive with kids in the car again.

After the movie, I asked them about that line that keeps getting repeated on social media: “We mothers stand still, so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.” It’s obviously about the individual journey: letting go of your parents’ hands and walking forward on your own path. It hits close to home right now. But it led to a conversation about how each generation becomes defined and the next one moves forward, defining itself.

And I pointed out that they are the first generation I can think of that have it worse than their mothers.

It was easier for my generation than my mother’s generation. We could get a credit card in our name and have legal, safe abortion. Just to name two things. They nodded, and her friend said, “Well, yeah. That.” But the more significant thing was that we had true freedom in that I could go where I wanted to go and do what I wanted to do. If those moments were documented at all, they were solely for the pleasure of the people in the group and lived on in paper photos or scraps of paper.

I’m not saying that people never endured their worst moments living on forever, but the scope of the damage was fairly small. A circle of friends. A town. I was free to make decisions and not think about how they may be interpreted a year, five years, or ten years down the road. No one knew what I looked like unless they met me or a mutual friend showed them a picture. I knew — pretty much — who knew me. Or knew of me.

That’s the thing about letting go of someone’s hand and moving forward. Are you free to become yourself — to find yourself with mistakes and all — if you trade your parents’ watchful eyes for the watchful eyes of smartphones and CCTV?

It was food for thought.

I knew what the letter would be even before I opened the envelope when I saw the return address: the NICU reunion.

Our hospital hosts a NICU reunion in the late summer/early fall. It’s a chance to visit and thank doctors and nurses, show off how kids have grown, and feel ill after jumping up and down in a bouncy castle after eating cotton candy. When the twins were little, it was a must-go event. We loved seeing their old neonatologist and favourite nurses, and I would swing by the NICU itself and talk to parents in the waiting room who had kids inside. That meant so much to me when my kids were in the hospital.

Mostly, it was lovely being part of this strange community of people who were all connected because our kids had to live in the hospital for a while.

Sometime during late elementary school, we stopped going. It’s geared towards younger kids, and the twins had moved out of the bouncy castle stage of life. It was bittersweet to skip the first year, but I barely thought about it in subsequent years until I opened this year’s letter.

It’s back in person for the first time in three years, but the date is after the twins leave for college. I will be home, but they will not be.

Part of me wants to swing by, but I’m not really a part of it now. Maybe it’s best to send a photo from graduation and a donation.

It’s hard to perfectly time life. In an ideal world, the final pages of the audiobook would be spoken the day before ChickieNob left for college, closing a (hopefully temporary) chapter of our walking club. But that’s not the way things went. The audiobook ended with weeks until school. The next book in the series would be about halfway finished when it was time to go.

Do we start it?

Do we wait?

It made things feel a lot more concrete to think about it in terms of unfinished stories, realizing just how soon she would leave. We decided to start the next book, and we would finish it separately. Or not at all. It’s a favourite series that we listen to a lot. No one would be left hanging if they decided it was too hard to keep listening to a story we were listening to together.

But it’s always on my mind now while we walk.

About five years ago, we went to Montreal during a cold snap. It was painful to walk outside, so we had to use the underground city to get anywhere, and we vowed we would go back in warmer temperatures to walk around above ground.

We traded super cold temperatures for super hot temperatures.

I’ve driven over the border crossing several times, and it’s usually a large operation — almost like a line of tollbooths on a highway. But when we drove up, we went through a tiny town with winding streets and finally pulled up to a single booth in a rural neighbourhood. The kind agent asked question after question about our trip, what we do in the US, and finally, why we were passing over the border in this random town that wasn’t a direct route to Montreal.

“Oh!” I said brightly. “Have you ever heard of the Three Pines books?”

With that, he rolled his eyes and waved us through. He did not want to hear about our Three Pines trip to see Gabri’s B&B and Myrna’s bookstore. Or that the town that inspired the books — Knowlton — has planted three pines on the village green where the Three Pines kids search for Easter eggs beside the pond.

I may have blurred fact and fiction.

We then spent a week in Montreal and Quebec City (the twins planned that part of the trip for us!), climbing to the top of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours chapel, learning everything we could about hockey, and eating St. Viateur bagels.

Did you see my squirrel friend in the picture above?

A final trip before they leave for college.