I have borrowed Harry Styles’ title today, “Sign of the Times.” Maybe I am getting emotional. It is the end of the year again, and my older son Luccas is turning thirty. I hope he does not read this today, though I am fairly certain this artist is nowhere near his must-listen list. And yes, thinking about his thirty years means thinking about my own accumulation of time, the way milestones in our children’s lives become mirrors we cannot quite avoid.

Thirty years. I keep turning that number over in my mind, trying to understand its weight. It feels both impossibly long and startlingly brief, the way all meaningful stretches of time seem to collapse and expand depending on which end you are standing at. One moment I am remembering the smallness of his hands wrapped around my finger, and the next I am looking at a grown man who carries his own memories now, ones I can witness only from a distance. He is still noisy, too, just as he was when he first got his drum set and managed to wake up the entire neighbourhood, or when he parades around with his maracas, delighted with the chaos he could make. Some things endure. Like the way he still refuses, with theatrical indignation, to accept my fondness for BTS.

The song speaks of breaking through atmospheres, of things looking better from a new vantage point, and I find myself holding onto that image. I think about how much parenting is spent watching someone break through one atmosphere after another. First the atmosphere of infancy, then childhood, then adolescence with all its storms. And now this new space is called adulthood, a space where he stands mostly on his own. Each time he rose into a new layer of his life, I found myself looking up, hopeful and uneasy, wanting him to feel the openness without losing sight of home.

Thirty feels like a threshold. He is past the frantic rush of the early twenties but not yet settled into the gravity of middle age. He is somewhere in between, learning about the world in a way I can no longer shape, only accompany me in spirit. It is a strange tenderness, this quiet stepping back. It asks for a kind of trust I am still practicing.

Maybe that is why the song returned to me. It’s not really about age. It’s about the ache of letting go while still loving fiercely, knowing that even as time carries us away from one version of life, there are places we’ll meet again: real rooms, shared memories, or just these quiet moments when the heart finally catches up to the past and sits with it a while.

I do not know if I have learned to deal with time passing. I am not sure anyone truly does. But I have learned to notice the moments that matter, to let them settle without grasping too tightly. Today my son turns thirty, and I find myself grateful not for the years themselves, but for the person he has become among them. That feels like enough.

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