The impossible maths of motherhood
Thursday, 23 April 2026
Virginia Fallon is a staff writer and columnist based in Wellington.
OPINION: On Sunday we have a birthday.
Sunday is not the actual birth day because the actual one falls on Monday, a day which is inconvenient for all this sprawling, extended family to get together.
Because we have work, naps, appointments and kindy we gather a day early, which feels faintly rebellious, as though we are cheating the calendar.
My son is turning 29.
“He’s 29?” I say again and again to anyone who will listen. “Can you believe it?”
I repeat this as though repetition might somehow correct the record. As though someone will eventually interrupt and say, “sorry, clerical error – he’s actually still seven”.
Twenty-nine is an age that belongs to other people’s children. Competent people with insurance policies, fixed-rate mortgages and the dull beginnings of back pain.
I have all of those, of course, but 29 does not belong to the slippery, furious infant who used to approach sleep as though it was a personal insult. The toddler who wanted to be Thomas the Tank Engine when he grew up. The little boy who got his shoelaces stuck in an escalator.
Yet here we are.
The birthday is held at his mother-in-law’s place because that’s what inevitably happens with sons. Mums start out hosting parties with fairy bread, pass-the-parcel and melted ice cream then years pass and suddenly we’re guests. Welcome ones, sure, but guests all the same.
There are little people underfoot now: small creatures who know him only as uncle or dadda: tall, solid and permanently patient.
They do not know the boy who once tried to flush an entire box of Weet-Bix down the toilet just to see what would happen. I do though, and I loved him first.
I look at him across the table while someone lights the candles and I have that familiar, disorienting split-screen feeling.
In one frame: the man he is now: broad-shouldered, steady, and prone to saying the most socially unacceptable, hilarious, things. In the other frame: the baby I brought home 29 years ago, folded into a car seat far too big for him, blinking at the world like it might have been a mistake.
Twenty-nine.
When he was born I was 18 years old and young enough to believe that time moved in orderly steps. Newborn, toddler, teenager, adult.
I did not understand then that it would move like this instead – in lunges and blinks. One minute you’re cutting a little guy’s grapes in half and the next you’re asking a giant to figure out your internet.
There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes with watching your children age. It’s not sadness exactly but awe, and fear, and the faint panic of realising you have travelled just as far.
Because if he has accumulated nearly three decades, then so have I – as a mother, as a woman, as someone who once stood in a tiny kitchen holding a newborn and wondering how in the everlasting hell the pair of us were meant to survive.
Yet we could, did, and on Sunday we cut the cake a day early. We sing, all of us, very badly and extremely loudly. He rolls his eyes at the fuss, then laughs anyway and lets the little ones blow out the candles.
On Monday – the actual day – I will say it again when I see him: “29?”.
And he is, of course, but inside the place where all mothers keep their impossible arithmetic he is also every other age all at once.
Newborn, toddler, teenager, adult.
He is the best thing that ever happened to me.