Tonight, the kids are going to go trick-or-treating with their friends, without us. It’ll be the first time that they’re both going out on their own. The last few years we’ve hung out with some parents while the kids have done loops around the block, but this is the first year they’re going out fully on their own. Which likely means that barring some weirdness, the last time we’ll ever go trick-or-treating with them has already happened.

It’s a melancholy thought. In some ways, it’s like, “Ah, that part of my job as their parent is done,” and in other ways, I didn’t want it to be over yet. And I’ve been reading Nemesis Games – the 5th book in the Expanse, and one line really hit me hard.

”Things change, and they don’t change back.”

The kids sitting on my lap, smiling and laughing while they chomp down hard on my finger, crushing it between their toothless gums. The kids creating their own animations, publishing them on Scratch – developing their skills, building little followings and social circles around their creative work, honing an identity that is uniquely theirs.

My youth, running and jumping and biking and being generally indestructible, able to take on any physical challenge anyone put in front of me. Then landing wrong during a soccer game and utterly destroying my knee and never taking even walking for granted again.

Sitting on the couch with Mobi draped across my lap, or hearing his nails click-clacking on the floor as he walked around in the middle of the night. Sitting in the vet office, holding his head as he closed his eyes for the last time. The silent nights that followed.

Sitting around a table with my work team, psyched about some new thing that we’re building, how people are responding to it, laughing and joking about some thing that only we, collectively, know. Realizing that most of those people won’t ever even really know why I left, how I left, and that their silence in that wake was a deafening roar I couldn’t stop hearing for a decade.

My dad’s accident.

2016.

I realize it’s silly. “Things change” is just one of those things people say all the time. But every time they change, I want the new steady-state to be all the things that things used to be and more. And that’s not how it is. Things change, and they don’t change back. Sometimes they’re better. Sometimes not. But they never are what they were.

It’s up to me to turn that change into something new, and figure out how to move forward with it. And I think the simple idea, “they don’t change back” is weirdly new to me. It rattled me when I read it, because it wasn’t how I thought about change. There was always a hope that things would return to what they were. And they won’t. They’ll be something else.

I’ve always hoped I’d be able to accept the changes in the kids as they grow. That I’d be able to accept their growing independence, and trust their judgment, and give them the freedom to make their own mistakes, while still hopefully imparting some experience and (ideally) wisdom that will set them on the right path. That I’d be able to see them one day as adults, instead of how my parents see me, which has never been as a fully self-sufficient, independent person.

Things change, and they don’t change back.

That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.