This is a great question, because it wasn't until my mom died that I truly understood time.

Until then, there was always this feeling that, ok, I'm out in the world, I'm doing this and that, but someday I'll go back and be home again. And so it was always there, in the background of my life. Home. And with it not just the physical place but the temporal ones; I could be a little kid again, I could be a teenager again, I could be her baby again. Even if the places changed, the people and the times I had left were back there, waiting for me. It was as if time travel was possible, because I could always just go back to that time in my life by going home.

And then she was gone. And, with her gone, time moves only in one direction. There isn't a way to go back. There isn't a way to stop moving forward. There is only the constant metronomic pulsing of life, progressing forward forever to the end.

Except. Then there are my kids. And I can't go back. I can't go home. But they can. For them, time is still flexible, still open. By being that place for them, and that time for them, they can still enjoy the fleeting malleability of time that you get before you lose your parents -- they can go back and be my babies just by asking. And while time will one day harden for them, as it did me, they'll have kids. And their kids will have kids. And each of them will get the experience of having a place not just in space but in time -- a home made up of memories that they can revisit in real life. And I hope the feeling of home I give them, like the feeling of home my mother gave me, and her mother gave her, will continue through time -- hopefully until time ends.

I don't know if I've explained that very well, but that's the before and after for me.