In my head, it's 2004

Hang on. I think I blinked or something.

I'm okay with the idea that my firstborn is turning five in a month's time - in fact, I've already made the mental switch, and was quite offended yesterday when somebody mentioned that I had a four-year-old. But I'm still in my early thirties.

Aren't I? I was, just a minute ago, before I had all those babies. (All both of them. I wouldn't want you to think you'd missed one or anything.) And I don't feel any older, or wiser. I know a bit more about the contraptions and vocabulary of baby-wrangling, that's all. My basic child-rearing tenets haven't changed since I was 30: love your babies and teach them good manners. I still think that's pretty much what it comes down to, it's just that now it takes up more real estate in my head, along with phrases and names like babywearing, attachment parenting, CIO, Dr Sears (good), and Ezzo (bad). I can discuss induction methods and nipple confusion with the best of them, and I even have strong feelings about some of it and a soapbox I cart out and dust off every now and then.

Of course back then I was a career girl, or at least a woman with a full-time job outside the house that paid actual money, and I slept all night every night, and I went out for dinner sometimes and watched rental movies all the way through in one go. Now, I haven't slept all night for five years. Maybe that's what happened to my sense of time passing: it fell through the gaps in the nights and floated away. Nights like a folded circle of paper with holes snipped out with a child's scissors: some big, when I wandered around the quiet house on hyperalert, or sleepwalked a crying baby for eternity; some tiny, when all I had to do was roll over and produce the other side, over and over. Open up the paper and the strong American sunlight shines through the holes and leaves behind a hundred baby photos scattered on the wooden floor.

The older I get, the thicker my metaphorical skin is - I care less and less what other people think so long as I'm comfortable with what I'm doing. But when I get three minutes at a time to look in the mirror nowadays, for the first time in a long time, it seems my real skin has got thinner. In repose I look mostly the same as I always did, with one short vertical line dug out between my brows - coincidentally enough, just in the place where my boyfriend used to say I got a cute wrinkle when I frowned. But if I animate my face, smile or talk at the mirror, I am shocked by the way it crinkles - crinkles! - at the eyes and around my mouth, and I am unnerved to see my mother's face appear fleetingly under my hair. So I quite like to hide behind my glasses, with their defensive coating of tiny scratches that make the world a little blurrier. If I can't see it, neither can you, right?

I suppose this is all part of the ongoing process of clambering out of the pleasant marshmallow of baby brain I've been enveloped in for the past several years. I need to re-embrace the world beyond, or something. And get a better haircut.