It’s been awhile since I’ve been six. Fortunately, I am gifted with daily glimpses, courtesy of my kid, to remind me of the joys + stresses contained in that life bracket. Six seems to be chock-full of humor, experimenting with personality traits, listening to non-soundtrack-based musical numbers, sharing playground wisdom with the younger crew, and so many bodily autonomy challenges. If you are caregiver to a six year old, the following twice-daily conversation may sound familiar: “I know you don’t “want” to brush your teeth, but it’s part of our job as parents to make sure your teeth don’t rot out, eh. Also, fixing teeth is v v expensive, and at six, some of the ones that count for life are in there! I promise kid, future you will be super pissed if your mom and I allow you to let your perfectly good adult teeth blacken and crackle right out of your noggin. Seriously though, that’s not brushing. Seriously, seriously you’re just talking to us with a toothbrush in there… you have to actually scrub them, ok?”

I remember scouring the interwebs in that same kiddo’s earliest years for morsels of information about how life would change as our baby turned in to a young kid. How our feels-like fifty-ten-minute-naps-a-day schedule, and being needed in every single way, at all hours of the day and night would progress in to something past my wife and I feeling like on-call nurses who also provided bountiful amounts of love, support, and clothing+laundry valet services. I didn’t identify as a totally selfish narcissist per say, but I also wasn’t so altruistic as to give up seven of my eight hours of sleep each evening for someone else. Each time I’d think to myself (or say on repeat to anyone with ears) that I didn’t have anything left to give. Then, every single time, I’d locate another hallway of resiliency in my mind, and muscle through the kid’s: ear infection, teething, stomach virus, respiratory illness, or somehow the hardest one of all for me… when the kid was up because they didn’t know the dang difference between night and day yet and didn’t feel a strong urge to sleep at 4am.

We watched as friends had additional babies after their first kids. We were happy for our friends, but all the while dead-eyed looking at each other, wondering if there was something inherently wrong with us that we’d like to never have an infant to care for ever again, please and thank you? If you present it with the right inflection and half-smile, you can sometimes get people to laugh with you at the ridiculous level of neediness babies require. But, say it with a frown on your face and you WILL get served up all of the ways in which you should feel grateful for every moment of horse shit that is infant wrangling. I should know, for real, because I made it in to my life’s work for five years. Listen, listen, listen, before you get too bent on how fortunate we are for having access to our specific childcare situation, please note we spent years of sanity and earning-potential dollars (“not working” costs a lot of money btw) so that one of us could stay with our kid in their earliest years. You truly don’t have to get angry at us; we know we are legit blessed that we were able to see in real time what our baby thought of their: music class, swim time, tummy time and how they reacted the first time they tasted a Meyer lemon midday.

Those first five years, my camera roll runneth over with visual proof of our kid’s explorations in this incredible city. I know all of that, ok. But, I am also allowed to say with a firm tone, that being a full-time caregiver to a human being from their age of zero days old, to age five+, is wild. I would tell AK often that while I wouldn’t have traded it, it felt really akin to me thinking I was signing up to do the polar bear plunge once for a fundraising event (like wow, that was hard and burrrr, so cold, but wheee it’s done!), but then it turns out in the fine print I inadvertently agreed to do multiple random daily additional ice-cold dips for two-thousand+ days in a row. Our family is fortunate + grateful AND it took a physical + emotional toll on each one of us in different ways. Both things are allowed to be true, simultaneously.

So, back to age six because hot damn, it is something else altogether y’all. The questions about the world and our places in it, the daily updates on friends and feelings, the finding favorite snacks, and movies we ALL laugh at, and listening to throwback bangers on the way to drop-off with this kid who says, “please turn it up really loud Lauren, I love this one”. These moments are a high like no drug I’ve ever had in this lifetime. We still get the occasional whiff of that intoxicating baby smell. It’s presence is only still known on the part of their head where it’s shaved, and with permission we can press our noses to their skin and they’ll say, “go ahead, you can smell my baby-head spot”. Then, their Mom and I take turns looking like cartoon characters when they follow a food smell across town, and find a whole pie in an open window to steal and eat on a sunny-on-tv day. Except it’s better than fake food; it’s a total flooding of memories from our baby’s life for our olfactory bulbs to delight in for a little while longer.

You may not know this yet, but superheros are real. They must be, right? Otherwise, how else could all of these six year olds be out there, walking around every day just lighting up our whole damn lives with their incredible courage, discerning questions, and their zest for exploring + helping others. Age six I tell you; it’s one of those golden ages...