I'm struggling to let go of my children being younger...anyone else?

[RedFence]

My sons are 9&13 and I feel what I can only describe as grief wash over me at the thought of them growing up, but more specifically, at the realisation that I will never get to experience them being very little again. I find it completely stops me in my tracks some days.

My youngest has ASD/ADHD. We are very close, but of course, being 9, he doesn't hold my hand when we're out anywhere near as much. It's the little things...I would love to take them soft play and go down the slide, the children's area of the musuem. Just little things.

Parenting is a series of loses and gains it feels. It feels much worse after leaving our home of 9 years last year. It just feels like grief.

I know i won't be alone in feeling like this...would really appreciate hearing your voice.

Teenagers can also be wonderful OP.
I have just been at a meeting in our church and my friend's 15 year old son just arrived at the hall to walk home with her so she wasn't walking on her own. He wasn't asked to, he had been to football practice and just did it. Fantastic lad!

This always makes me cry

Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile
I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness
And I have to sit down for a while

The feeling that I'm losing her forever
And without really entering her world
I'm glad whenever I can share her laughter
That funny little girl

Slipping through my fingers all the time
I try to capture every minute
The feeling in it
Slipping through my fingers all the time
Do I really see what's in her mind?
Each time I think I'm close to knowing
She keeps on growing
Slipping through my fingers all the time

Sleep in our eyes, her and me at the breakfast table
Barely awake, I let precious time go by
Then when she's gone, there's that odd melancholy feeling
And a sense of guilt I can't deny

What happened to the wonderful adventures
The places I had planned for us to go?
(Slipping through my fingers all the time)
Well, some of that we did, but most we didn't
And why, I just don't know

[Chorus]

Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture
And save it from the funny tricks of time
Slipping through my fingers

Slipping through my fingers all the time
Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile

Andersson/Ulvaeus

Life is a series of losses. We have to come to terms with that or be miserable.