Parenthood is the most important thing I have ever done. I say that having built companies, practised medicine, loved one person for thirty years. None of it comes close. My children are the nearest thing to miracles I have ever stood beside — and I was present for all of it, and somehow not present for any of it, at the same time.
That’s the grief that arrived after we left Korea. Not the transition grief; I was making peace with that, one four a.m. at a time. This was older, and quieter. The grief of a parent who was there for every birthday and every first word and every school run and every childhood illness — and who remembers all of it with the precision of a court record, every detail intact, and almost no feeling attached to any of it.
I had been a witness to my own children’s lives.
The realisation didn’t arrive as a thought. It arrived watching an ordinary scene on television — a couple being told, gently, that a door was closing for them. I’d seen it years before and it had landed as television: well made, affecting, gone by the next scene. This time the ground gave way. Not because their situation was mine, but because watching a door close lands differently once you understand your own has already closed behind you.
The channel that had been flat through all of it was open now — open, and grieving everything it had missed, and understanding at the same moment that there was nothing left to go back for. Every detail of my children’s early years, preserved perfectly. No feeling attached. And me arriving, finally able to feel, decades too late for the one thing I most wish I could feel my way back into.
I wrote in my diary: I remember the events, but as a witness, not as someone who was there.
That’s the one I can’t fix. The rest of this — the documents, the face, the long slow work toward who I am — all of it is, in the end, workable. This isn’t. You don’t get the years back. You only get to feel, now, exactly how much they were worth.
And to be present, fully and at last, for whatever is still to come.
