To succeed as a parent means, ultimately, making yourself redundant. Or at the very least stepping down into a part-time, less challenging role.

And at this time of year, the darker mornings and the early evening illumination of the street lights, remind me that summer 2025 is drawing to a close.

For me, and maybe you too, late August feels like the true beginning of the year. Deeply ingrained in my psyche as a time for fresh starts and blank stationery, haircuts and homework.

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Some of you may have little ones returning to school and are busy digging out forgotten black bananas from last year’s backpacks, hoping that at least some of their uniform still fits. More of you are doling out money like it’s going out of fashion to secondary school students, as others prepare to send young adults off to begin their third-level education.

Perhaps they’re off to a local college just a short bus ride away, or maybe a campus on the other side of the country, or even overseas? And as you pull suitcases down from the attic, pushing aside the boxes of Christmas decorations, it’s hard not to wonder where their childhood went, passing us by in a blur of school and work and the mundane busyness that is the bread and butter of day-to-day life.

Tiny teeth tucked under pillows, birthday parties and chicken pox, and children with bit parts as angels in Christmas concerts. Shepherd’s pie every Tuesday, homemade cards too precious to ever discard, and slammed doors and broken teenage hearts.

Those first steps, the first time a tiny hand clasps yours, the first time you hear that beautiful word ‘mammy’.

And it’s all those firsts, those minor miracles, that bring us too soon to our goodbyes, after all the long days and short years of waiting.

You might wait to get pregnant, then to give birth. We all spent a lot of time waiting for them to go to sleep, only to wait for them to wake up again.

Those first steps, the first time a tiny hand clasps yours, the first time you hear that beautiful word ‘mammy’

You wait outside school gates, on sidelines, by swimming pools and sometimes, worryingly, beside hospital beds holding impossibly small bodies.

As the years pass, you wait for their key in the door when they’ve ‘missed the last bus’, and we won’t go into the unquantifiable amount of time that you’ve waited for them to answer their phones and return your text messages.

But they’re always worth the wait, and we who are fortunate enough to still have our children in our lives have the privilege of saying goodbye as they shed us and grow their new skin.

So, to all of you packing your sons and daughters off to college with bright smiles and broken hearts, take a bow.

Your children’s achievements are impressive, all the more so when you put them against the backdrop of the last 100 years most-significant medical crisis. Not since the end of World War I and the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 have young Europeans faced such profoundly life-altering challenges as the Covid pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine.

They have missed out on many of the rites of passage that previous generations took for granted, so they don’t need us to tell them that life is rarely straightforward. This generation is all too aware that life isn’t easy.

Yet despite these challenges, they were born lucky. Born to parents who loved and educated them, and who worked hard to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

So as you hold back tears, and wave them off to college in tightly packed cars, or watch them vanish through the portal of passport control – no sharps, no liquids, no parents past this point – remind yourself that they’re only using the wings you gave them when you told them they could be anything, go anywhere.

And, like homing pigeons, it won’t be long until they find their way back again, dragging a bag of washing behind them, and a new appreciation, as they check the stocked fridge, for you at home.

Still waiting.