Sunday Edition: Time moves differently depending on where we stand.

Grief follows time, but so does the beauty of moments well noticed

The Sunday Edition is Tuesday’s little sister—off-the-cuff updates I’d bring up over a coffee catch-up with a friend.

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Time has a funny way of shifting shape depending on where you are in life.

Some days feel endless—thick with waiting, with holding, with doing. Others vanish so fast it’s like they were never really there at all, just a blur of errands and routines and unanswered texts. We’re told to “manage” time, to use it well, to make the most of it—but the harder I try to hold it, the more it slips through my hands.

Motherhood cracked that truth wide open for me.

Becoming a mom made me aware of time in a way nothing else ever had. How it expands and contracts in the most disorienting ways. How a single hour can feel like forever, and then somehow an entire year disappears without warning. But honestly, you don’t have to be a parent to feel it. Just getting older will do that—make you notice the passing of time with a tenderness you didn’t used to carry.

We like to think time moves in a straight line. Forward, onward, next. But memory has its own logic. Nostalgia loops it back. A scent, a song, a familiar hallway—and suddenly you’re not just remembering, you’re there. You’re both who you are and who you were. And for a brief moment, you’re living inside the overlap.

I find myself caught in those moments more often these days. Watching my kids from across the room, knowing I’ll remember this, whatever this is, years from now. The way her curls stick to her cheeks after a bath. The sound of his feet running through the hallway in socks. The way they still climb into my lap like I’m home.

And that remembering? It’s beautiful. But also, it breaks me a little.

Time keeps passing even though we all try to control it. We may try to freeze it, stretch it, slow it down, speed it up, rewind it, but we all know we can't control it. And as I grapple with the grief of time, every single day. When one of them comes in in the morning just a stretch taller, or another says something so adorably naive. I’m trying not only to clutch on tightly, but to pay even more attention. To emboss moments just the way you would press a thick, waxy seal onto an envelope, hoping to keep them permanent and untouched in my memory and heart forever. I'm trying to be more mindful to not let the big, small, or in-between moments go unnoticed. To hold more of them by collecting moments the way some people collect shells or pressed flowers, tucking them away, not to hoard, but to revisit when I need them.

Maybe that’s the most generous thing we can do for ourselves when it comes to our time. To slow down long enough to recognize when we are inside a moment worth keeping. To linger a little longer in the warmth of a conversation. To look at your child exactly as they are for a beat longer. To feel the weight of their head on your shoulder, to notice the light at golden hour when everything feels just a little softer. To let our hands rest on the pages of a book before turning them. To sit with the feeling of something beautiful before rushing on to what’s next.

There’s a quiet kind of grief in watching your children grow. In watching anything grow, really. It’s not dramatic—it’s just steady. The soft ache of knowing certain things are already gone. The baby teeth. The mispronounced words. The shoes with Velcro. The notes written in backwards letters. The way they once needed you to reach the faucet, to zip the jacket, to stay until they fell asleep.

And you want to hold it all. You want to keep every version of them. But you can’t. That’s the deal. You get to keep the memories, and they get to keep growing.

There’s so much beauty in that. And sometimes, there’s also a little heartbreak.

And both are true. At the same time.

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