How Do You Know When Your Kids Are Too Old for Cuddles?

“I don’t think I can go to school today.” My daughter’s voice is hoarse, and she opens her eyes for a second, squinting against the glare of the morning light. I can tell by looking at her that she’s not well: her cheeks are pink and flushed, and her eyes are a little glassy. She’s had a mild cough all weekend. I’d already planned to keep her home from school today. But I go through the motions anyway, assessing her condition. I sit on the edge of the bed and lean over to press the palm of my hand to her forehead. I pretend that I am thinking, pondering, considering. Then I pretend that her hair is in the way, and I start over so I can press my hand to her forehead a second time, leaving it there for five seconds, then ten, fifteen. I can feel the warmth of her body against my leg, the soft skin of her face under my palm. I linger as long as possible, dragging it out. I want to stay, to climb under the blanket and listen to her breathing, murmur “Mommy is here” and “Everything is okay now,” as I have so many times before. I want her to hear my voice and tuck her head into my shoulder, seeking comfort in a place where she knows she will find it. But I can’t, and she won’t. She’s too old for all that now. There will be no cuddles, no taking care; she won’t want me to stay nearby as she rests. So I tell her I’ll go get the thermometer, I’ll refill the humidifier, I’ll get some Tylenol (the adult stuff now, no more grape-flavoured liquid in this house). I tell her to hold tight, that I’ll be back soon. She nods, shifts her body away from me so that her hip is no longer pressed against my leg, and burrows down into her blanket, head disappearing entirely. “Can you turn the light off?” she asks, a statement more than a question. I’ve been dismissed. “Of course.” My throat closes around the word, tears pricking at my eyes. I shut off the light, close the door, and retreat.

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Once upon a time, it was hard to tell where I ended and my children began. Before they were born, of course, we were literally one—their survival dependent on my own for nine long months. My food was their food, my blood their blood. As they grew, I grew too. Every kick and hiccup and roll echoed across my belly in ripples and bumps. But even after they were born, the line between us remained blurry, sometimes invisible, melting in the intensity of those early years of mothering. I carried both of them in baby slings at first, then baby wraps, and later in steel-framed backpack carriers for long walks on dirt trails. I took showers while they lay in bouncy chairs on the bathroom floor, peeking out the curtain every few seconds to smile and play peekaboo. I brought them into the bath with me, washed their little bodies first, then my own. I took eighteen months off after my first was born, twelve when my second was born, and then left my job entirely just before they turned six and three. I was with them all day, every day. We went to the pool, to the park, to the library, to preschool. My first born always wanted “up, up, up,” which was his way of asking to sit on my lap, to cuddle with me, to be as close as possible. At tot drop-ins and play dates, he’d race off to jump and climb and kick the ball, but every few minutes, he’d return for an “up, up, up” interlude. In one of the few videos I have from his early childhood, he interrupts himself mid-thought to ask “Up?” I encourage him to continue sharing his story, but a moment later, he asks again: “Up?” The camera wobbles, then the recording ends. I had to set it down so I could help him climb up. He says now that one of his first memories is of asking to get up on my lap but I was very pregnant and told him there wasn’t really room anymore. I was probably also nauseous; I had morning sickness twenty-four hours a day for most of both pregnancies. I am not surprised I said no, but I hate to think that of all the times he ever asked to get up, the one he remembers is the time I declined. My second was not so much an “up, up, up” child. But she was a cuddler, particularly a midnight cuddler. She’d appear, bedside, in the middle of the night. “Get in?” she’d say, more a statement than a question (a pattern, apparently). I’d lift the blankets and she’d crawl in, lie down, and tuck herself into the curved space of my body. When she was little, I’d wait until she had dozed off, then move her back to her own bed, knowing we would all get a better sleep that way. But I never said no to the request. People often told me that letting kids into your bed in the middle of the night was a bad idea. They’d get used to it, not be able to sleep without you, have a hard time self-soothing when necessary. My answer was always the same: I’ve never heard of a teenager that still wants, or needs, to sleep with a parent. I knew it would drift away as she got older, and inevitably it did. When she was about eleven, the requests to “get in” became less frequent. No matter how tired I was, how much I could have used the uninterrupted sleep, no matter how much room her growing body took up in the bed, I still never said no. Eventually, she would ask for the last time, and I didn’t want to miss it. Months passed without a single middle-of-the-night appearance. I figured that was it, the final night had passed, unmarked. Then, a few months after her twelfth birthday, while my husband was away on a fishing trip, she arrived like a zombie, eyes closed, and asked to get in. “Of course, of course,” I said and flung back the blankets, letting her take the warm spot while I shuffled over to the empty cold side. After she fell asleep, she rolled into me, her head pressed against my arm, her slow breath tickling my skin. I thought to myself: “This is it, for sure. This is the last time. Remember this. Remember this.” I fell asleep wishing I could have another night, and another night, but knowing I would not. At some point, she must have wandered back to her own room; she was asleep in her bed when I woke up in the morning, and later when I asked about her midnight arrival—“Did you have a bad dream, was your room cold?”—she didn’t recall having woken up at all or being in my room. Like so many mothering memories, this final night of sleeping alongside my child is something that only one of us will remember. T hey are teenagers now. Bedroom doors are closed, bathroom doors are locked. It’s hard to recall the mindless ease of slipping in and out of bedrooms while they dressed for the day, or sitting by the side of the bath while someone made bubbles. I wouldn’t dare to mention that, once upon a time, we took baths together or slept cuddled up. They’d cringe. Or, worse, they’d call me “cringe.” But I think of these things often, when they laugh a particular way and I see their toddler faces still hiding there in the lines of their almost-grown-up faces, or when they’re upset and stressed, and by instinct my hands move to hug, to rub a shoulder, to comfort. I think of it when we go for walks—increasingly less frequent—and I still reach, unthinking, for their not-so-little hands when we have to cross a busy street. I think, too, of how many days I spent with barely a single minute untouched by another human being, how I couldn’t pee alone or change alone or go to sleep alone or shop alone or shower alone. I think of how often I wished desperately to be alone for a few minutes, to have some solitary time with my own body and my own thoughts. How going to the dentist felt like a trip to the spa, because for an hour or so, no one needed anything of me other than to lie down in silence. I resented, as most parents do, the wistful admonition by older parents to enjoy it while it lasts. It was hard then, nearly impossible in fact, to imagine that I might wish for more of the intensity of early parenting, to wish not to be alone, waiting for someone to ask me to go for a walk, to tell me some secrets, to cozy up on the couch and watch Frosty the Snowman for the hundredth time on a well-worn DVD. But here I am, wishing and waiting. T o be a mother, it seems, is to forever be in the process of remembering and forgetting, of tucking away small memories and erasing others. It is coming to the end of the day and recalling only the times you messed up—when you were short tempered, or frustrated, when you didn’t spend long enough down on the floor playing with trains or you fed your child fast food in the car because you were late for an appointment. It’s also, paradoxically, looking back from the distance of a few years and somehow forgetting all the hard things and rewatching everything through a golden haze: gone is the colic and the sleepless nights and the hundreds of pieces of Lego that bit into your foot while walking through the living room. All that remains of the past is the soft fuzz of a baby’s head, or the way a child looked fast asleep with their little bum in the air and their tiny toddler arms tucked underneath them, or how they whispered all their secrets to you from morning to night. We remember the best days, the loudest giggles, the tightest hugs. And then, too, we remember the days that fill us with regret, the days we wish we could redo with more patience and love and calm. Both are a kind of torture: here, remember this beautiful thing you no longer have . . . here, remember this awful thing you wish you could change. And the brain runs over and through and around both of these, as though replaying the memories often enough might somehow change them. Parenting is the only job that I know of in which one’s goal is to make yourself functionally obsolete over time. It is to invest every part of yourself in something that will, that must, one day leave you. And, along the way, to force yourself into this necessary amnesia of forgetting what it felt like when there was no line between you, because remembering is to ache with longing. There is no alternative to it. I’d simply assumed I was better prepared for the transition. Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. I recite these lines over and over, a passage from Kahlil Gibran’s poem “On Children,” while I fold laundry or wash dishes or walk alone in the deep ravine near my house. It is one of the truest things about being a mother I have ever read. It goes: They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. These are not my children now. They never really belonged to me at all. They belong only to themselves, as they always have, and to a future where I will not exist, someday. The house of tomorrow waits for them alone. D uring a recent visit from some out-of-town friends, my son’s bedroom was turned into a temporary spare room for guests. He slept the first night in the basement, the second on the couch, and the third night he fell asleep—while the rest of us watched a movie—on my bed, fully dressed. He’s too big to move, and rousing him from deep sleep seemed cruel. My husband volunteered to take the couch and went back downstairs; I grabbed a second blanket (the first had been wrapped entirely around my son’s body like a cocoon) and fell asleep next to him. Sometime after midnight, I woke with a jolt—there was a muffled noise, talking, twisting. He was having a bad dream. “Hey bud, it’s okay. Shhhh,” I whispered. “You’re just having a nightmare, it’s okay, it’s okay. You’re okay. I’m right here.” He must have heard me, because the rustling stopped. He reached his hand out. “Mum? Mum.” He was mumbling, still in a foggy state of dreams and half sleep. “I’m here.” I touched his hand. “I’m here.” He gripped it, hard. “Love you,” he said, then snored. His hand—so much larger than my own now—held tight. I fell asleep rubbing my thumb across the back of his hand. The line between us is more defined with each passing year, a border that becomes wider and more permanent every day. But once in a while, even now, the line is thin. Once in a while, we are still like one. Excerpted from Halfway Home: Thoughts from Midlife by Christina Myers, 2024, published by House of Anansi. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.The post How Do You Know When Your Kids Are Too Old for Cuddles? first appeared on The Walrus.