It's odd to realize that you never quite live in the same world that your children do. At every stage of their lives and yours, you're never truly aligned. This is probably most clear when they're teenagers and they live not just in a different world, sometimes one that revolves around boys and clothes and make-up and who they like and who likes them and which teachers are completely unfair and who is going ice skating tonight and why is she talking behind my back and on and on, but in a totally different dimension, one to which you have no access and never will again. Even as they grow toward adulthood, you, too, have moved on, away from the frenzy of college and first jobs and the newness of living on your own, toward the middle of your career, with thoughts of the dwindling years available to save for retirement, and what you'll do with that extra room once they're really out the door, and what you've accomplished so far with your life. They have parts of their lives you'll know nothing about, which contrasts so starkly with their childhood, in which you played such a central role, when you knew every millimeter of their lives, were familiar with every toy, every fear, every step. And when you share those moments that evaporate as quickly as tears in the sun, when you click into the same dimension, the same world, the same instant, and you recognize that it's happened, you can't blink, or breathe, or mention that you realize it, or the magic drains away, and you're back in your parallel universes once again.

Why is it that when I drive at night, on roads I travel every day, that the landscape outside the car windows seems to slide by so much faster than it does in the daylight? I find myself driving much more slowly, all the while feeling as if I'm flying through the night. Is it the lack of visual cues, the blacks and greys of the night, or does time really move differently in the dark?

Tonight I slipped out the back door onto the deck, down the steps, across the dew-laden grass, around the pool, to the spa that I had turned on to heat earlier in the evening. The warmth rose in waves of mist from the surface, sheer and shadowy in the not-quite-full moon. The Big Dipper hung low in the northern sky while a star or planet glowed toward the south. I soaked and floated and drifted on imaginary tidal currents for an hour or more. No one noticed I was gone. No phones rang, no email flashed an insistent wicked light, demanding to be answered, no voices called. The moonlight shimmered on the water, the tree frogs sang to each other, the warm water cloaked me, and I had my secret hour of solitude.