Every stranger in every grocery store used to say it to me while I was pregnant, exhausted, and mildly annoyed by the unsolicited advice.
“Enjoy it, it goes so fast.” I nodded politely each time and thought, respectfully, that they had no idea what my nights currently looked like, or how far away “fast” felt from inside them.
They were right.
I hate how completely right they turned out to be, but they were, and I’ve since become one of those strangers myself, catching myself saying it to pregnant women in the same grocery store, feeling a little embarrassed each time I do.
The thing about fast that nobody explains properly
Nobody tells you that “fast” doesn’t mean the days themselves feel short while you’re inside them.
Some days are brutally, endlessly long, minute by minute. Bedtime at 6pm has never once felt fast in the actual moment of getting there, not once, not on the easiest day.
What’s fast is the stretch behind you, the one you genuinely can’t see clearly while you’re still standing inside it, only once you’ve stepped far enough away to look back.
I have a video of my daughter at eleven months old, standing at the coffee table, one hand gripping the edge for balance, saying “uh oh” over and over because she’d figured out it made me laugh every single time without fail.
I watched it again recently, on an ordinary evening, and had to leave the room.
Not because it’s sad exactly. Because that specific baby, that exact version of her, doesn’t exist anymore in any form, and I didn’t know at the time that I was watching the last of her, not the first of something new.
You don’t get told which day is the last one
That’s the part that actually gets me most, more than the general speed of it.
There’s a last time you carry them on your hip without thinking twice about it.
A last time they mispronounce a specific word in that exact toddler way that made your whole family repeat it back just to hear it again.
A last nap, a last time they need you to cut their food, a last time a stuffed animal comes everywhere.
Nobody rings a bell to mark any of it. You just look up one ordinary day and realize it already happened, weeks or months earlier, entirely without your permission or awareness.
I used to think “it goes fast” meant I should be constantly present and grateful in every single moment, soaking up every second like some kind of ongoing performance of gratitude I was supposed to be delivering.
That’s not actually humanly possible, and expecting it of yourself just adds a fresh layer of guilt directly on top of exhaustion that’s already there.
Some days you’re genuinely just surviving until nap time, watching the clock more than the child, and that’s allowed too, even inside a stage you know is temporary.
The specific sounds I know I’ll miss
Not the big milestones. The tiny mispronunciations that exist for exactly one narrow window before correcting themselves forever.
“Aminal” instead of animal. “Hostipal” instead of hospital. A specific way she said my own name for almost a year before switching, seemingly overnight, to the correct version everyone else already used.
I didn’t write any of those down when they were happening, assuming, wrongly, that I’d remember the exact sound forever just because I loved it so much in the moment.
I don’t remember the exact sound anymore, not precisely, only that I loved it. That’s its own small grief, one nobody warns you about specifically, the grief of losing the sound itself even while keeping the memory of loving it.
Why the ordinary days matter more than I expected
I used to think the years would be marked by their big events, first steps, first day of school, first lost tooth, clearly labeled and easy to locate later in memory.
Instead what actually stays vivid, unexpectedly, is the ordinary in-between texture. The specific weight of her asleep on my chest during a nap neither of us needed but both of us wanted anyway.
The fifteen-minute walk to preschool that we did almost every day for two years, rain or shine, that I couldn’t describe in specific detail if you asked me to, and yet somehow miss more than almost anything else from that stretch.
Nobody tells you the unremarkable days are the ones that end up carrying the most weight in hindsight, more than the ones you actually planned and photographed on purpose.
What I actually do with this now
I take more photos of the boring moments now than the milestone ones, on purpose, as a deliberate correction.
The milestone photos take care of themselves, mostly, since everyone remembers to grab the camera for a first step or a birthday.
Nobody documents the fourteenth Tuesday in a row of the exact same breakfast, the same cartoon playing in the background, the same small hand reaching for mine at the same crosswalk on the same walk to school.
Those are the ones I actually go back to now, more than the posed ones.
I try to actually look at old photos sometimes too, not just glance past them while doing five other things at once, phone in one hand.
Not constantly, and not in a way that turns into its own kind of grief spiral.
Just often enough that I’m not only remembering this current stage in hindsight, once it’s already over and impossible to return to.
What changes once they start school
Nobody prepared me for how sharply the pace seems to shift once a kid starts full days away from you, at school, structured, on somebody else’s schedule for the bulk of daylight hours.
The stretch before school felt slow in the moment and fast in hindsight. The stretch after has felt fast in both directions at once, which is its own strange adjustment.
You get less of the ordinary, unremarkable time that turned out to matter so much, replaced by a shorter, more concentrated window each evening that somehow has to hold everything.
I didn’t expect to grieve that specific shift as much as I did, even while being genuinely glad to watch her build a life outside our house that has nothing to do with me.
It goes fast and it’s also genuinely hard, at the same time
I don’t think “it goes fast” is supposed to erase or excuse how hard some of these days genuinely are while you’re living them.
Both things are true in the exact same breath, without one canceling the other out.
This is exhausting, in a way that’s hard to describe to anyone not currently inside it, and it is also disappearing faster than I want it to, in a way that’s equally hard to describe.
I can hold both facts at once without needing to resolve them into a single tidy feeling.
Why I stopped rushing the hard stages
Somewhere around the third or fourth “it goes so fast” from a well-meaning stranger, I started noticing my own instinct to rush through the difficult parts, hoping to reach the easier version of parenting on the other side of them faster.
Sleep regressions, clingy phases, the toddler stretch nobody warns you is as physically demanding as it is. I wanted through them, not present in them, and I don’t think that instinct is wrong or shameful. It’s human.
But knowing now how quickly even the hard stages become the specific texture I’d give quite a lot to feel again, even briefly, changed how I hold the current hard stage, whatever it happens to be at any given time.
Not by forcing gratitude I don’t feel in the moment. Just by not wishing quite so hard for it to be over, since it’s going to be over regardless of how I spend the time inside it.
What stays, even after the stage ends
My daughter is seven now. She still says “uh oh” sometimes, entirely on purpose, just to make me laugh the way she used to accidentally, and for one full second I get to see the eleven-month-old version of her flicker through her current face.
That’s the part nobody fully warned me about ahead of time.
It doesn’t completely leave when a stage ends. It just gets quieter, and the moments get further apart, and somehow that scarcity makes it matter even more than it did the first time around.
If you’re standing inside a hard, loud, exhausting stretch of this right now, I’m not going to tell you to cherish every second, because that’s not actually useful advice, and I never found it comforting either.
I’ll just tell you what the strangers in the grocery store were actually trying to say, badly, in five seconds between the eggs and the checkout line: it changes faster than feels possible from inside it, and most of what you’re currently enduring will someday be something you’d give quite a lot to have back, even the hard parts, especially the hard parts.
That doesn’t make today easier. It just might make today worth one more long look before it becomes a memory instead of a moment.
