Every year, we say to our son that we 'can't believe we are getting rid of that annoying 4 year old/25 year old' whatever year he is - and it's a joke, because we love him whatever age he is. This year, I texted him that we couldn't believe that we were getting rid of that 'annoying 28 year old'. Crikey. He's flippin' TWENTY NINE!!

Time is a rubber band. My internal sense of time doesn't always keep up with reality. How can he be twenty nine when I'm only twenty one?

I still hold him in multiple versions at once. The small kid obsessed with Lego, the guitar playing quiet and often grumpy teenager making faces at the camera, the man with a nearly 4 year old now, off to work this morning with his new knitted jumper, gifted by his long term partner. One version of him doesn't replace the other - I'm seeing little J inside him, a kind of Russian Doll perhaps. My brain goes wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

It’s that rubber band thing. The years compress and curl in on themselves. Whole stretches collapse into a handful of vivid, technicolour moments - his tiny foot in the small of my hand as we slept, his flannel pajamas with airplanes, him reading me Dahl's 'The Twits' in the back of the car on the way to Scotland. Meanwhile, the actual length of time it took to get from there, a little boy eating Weetabix, to here, where on Facetime his son sits there and eats Weetabix and listens to us sing happy birthday, just disappears.

And if he's that fucking old, so am I, if not - older. How did that happen? Inside are all the messy bits that were always messy, and the tidier bits I've earnt. More happiness, more consistently. Sometimes you're a better grandparent than a mother, because all the messy shit in the rubber band's potential has been flung off as the rubber snaps back and into place. You might not have the energy for parenthood, but you have the headspace, the attention, the patience.

I know logically that there are all of these hidden parts of my son I cannot hope to understand. He's not mine, he's not even who I have constructed him to be - he's this unique, individual, beautifully formed version of himself, an adult, independent. I can't take credit for who he is, because he always was who he was - calm, intelligent, measured, steadfast, hilariously dry. I see who he is as a father and admire him deeply for being so undeniably present, loving and true, and I admire his refusal to buy into the need for a well paid white collar job and 'be happy', but instead do what makes him happy.

But at the same time, I remember hiding behind posts in Vienna saying 'can you see me' in a hilarious running joke, him timid when he met an actual night at Praha castle, him crying when our plane left because he'd miss his grandparents, him having the only tantrum he ever had and us laughing about it, him learning to read by connecting letters on the London circle line, him shoving Lego spaceships in my face when I first woke up, him playing guitar whilst I made dinner.

There was never any annoying version of my boy - I loved, and still love, all of them at once, stretched and compressed in the rubber band of time.