Sometimes it’s hard to sit down and tap out a column, some brief assembly of paragraphs meant to detail my nuanced opinion on political intrigue or social unrest, especially when so much energy is exerted each day in carrying the weight of this Alabama life atop my shoulders.

Indeed, it’s a charmed life I lead, being able to put pen to paper for a paycheck, but the charm of any life becomes like the sheen on a precious antique, it fades with time and no longer glows as it did before – it’s still the same artifact, but it looks different and, in a strange way, that makes it not the same artifact.

My daughter started back to school this week and, as I did last year, I walked her to class on the first day and met her teacher and found her table and cubby hole, then kissed her goodbye and made my way on through the day.

On day two, the same routine played out, but my son wondered aloud when he would get to start kindergarten – I began to reply that he would be starting school next year when I felt that familiar lump in my throat, the one that precedes tears when I think about those tiny hands outgrowing my own and those tiny voices growing louder, but I powered through and he was overjoyed, as if next year were a day right around the corner.

Yes, sometimes it’s hard.

We spend so much of our time worrying about one thing or another – how we’re going to pay the bills and buy groceries on a shoe-string budget, the various tasks that lay ahead as we trek to and from work each day, the endless barrage of chores required to keep a household afloat – that we seem to have little time left to watch our children grow.

And not guided growth, but akin to watching a flower bloom in a front yard garden, with no inclination to point it in one direction or another, but simply enjoy seeing it spring from the earth and open to the sun and grow and grow and grow.

My children are still small, but already I can feel the profound sense of loss that will overcome me when they no longer need me to make their dinner or help them pick out clothes, when they no longer want to hold my hand or have me walk them to class, and it leaves me almost immobile each day to think that I’m missing even a second of the days when those things are still required.

A quote that has always resounded with me as it relates to my children is this: “The days are so long and yet the years are so short.”

Nothing could be more true of being a parent – wading through the day’s responsibilities, simply with an eye toward survival, seems a never-ending chore, but then we wake up to find the chubby faces and babbling lips we’ve cherished are no longer there and we wonder what really we’ve gained by missing their changes.

Yes, sometimes it’s hard, but we, as parents, must strive every day to recognize, in all of its glory and tribulation, the gift that a child brings into a home and into a life because, one day, they’ll be gone from our homes and none of us wants to look back and wonder where we were.