By the time you read this, my child will have turned 21 months old. I am still trying to wrap my head around this fact. ‘Die Zeit vergeht so schnell’ is the most banal thing that people I meet here say. It is the German equivalent of ‘Time flies’. I feel an allergic reaction in my brain when this uttered, because it sounds, inadvertently, like an erasure of all the parental labour and care work that has marked this time. I understand the logic behind this non-profound observation. The first two years of a baby’s life are so unique simply because of how many changes their bodies go through within this compressed span. They go from being unable to hold their head up independently to running and spinning in circles pretending to hop. The process is humbling, because you are committed to being accountable for another human being and ensuring they are so autonomous, they no longer need you. For the greatest task of parenting is to work towards making yourself redundant.

I remain in unspeakable awe of people who choose to do this alone. There are so many single mothers out there in the child-caring trenches struggling without access to nurturing support systems. On the other hand, what has improved over the course of my lifetime is the attitude of men towards parenting. I was watching a Tik Tok in which a millennial pointed out how the fathers of Gen Z and Gen Alpha are so much more present than fathers of previous generations. Even until the 1990s, a father was expected to ‘show up’ for kids’ recitals, exams or other important events. They weren’t tasked with being a part of their everyday lives, packing lunch boxes or keeping tabs on what they were learning in school. Most of the heavy lifting has historically been performed by mothers, not to mention the intensity of emotional labour such as remembering the names of kids’ friends or their birthdays. Mothers oversaw all these minutiae, more often than not while simultaneously holding on to a full-time or part-time form of employment.