It was a nice day on Sunday so I walked the boys to the park. My eldest cycled, the youngest walked, and I use ‘walk’ in its loosest possible sense. The scenic route that winds from our house to the park would take an average adult, walking at a brisk pace, about twenty minutes. It takes my children about as long as it took the three little girls in Rabbit Proof Fence to walk from the top of Australia to the bottom. My kids – even on bikes – dawdle like tourists. They sniff and search like dogs. Not a blade of grass or a fallen crisp packet is left un-investigated. Not a single opportunity to bicker or fight is squandered.

My eldest, Jack, 6 (almost), kept cycling off round corners as I hollered after him like a damsel in a horror film, as my youngest pestered me every few minutes to be lifted onto my back or shoulders, on the grounds that his legs were about to fall off. In the end he was more backpack than boy; a land-mine-lacerated soldier in NAM being rushed to the EVAC point. When we eventually made it to the park, we had just over an hour left to enjoy its delights before we would have to gather up the sherpas for the long hike back home, and to dinner –  you know, that meal where it’s a fifty/fifty shot whether the kids will eat anything, or just drop it on the ground and lobby for cake.

Time (and the coronavirus) has both brought the boys much closer together, and made them fight more viciously and frequently than ever before, but for all their shared ground and similarities each new day seems to bring a fresh divergence between their respective wants and needs.

Jack wanted to cycle round the bike circuit at the park – paved and lined to look like a town in microcosm, with park benches and bored parents standing in as buildings. Christopher wanted to run riot in the play-park itself. Naturally, I had to accompany Chris, on the grounds that he’s three, and more likely to attempt a daring escape. Luckily – for both my legs and my aversion to child social services – the two areas are only separated from each other by a hip-high metal fence.

I positioned myself inside the play-park so I was loosely equidistant from the two boys, with a clear line of sight to both. Whenever I put my focus on one of them I had to quickly crane my neck and spin around like a giant, agitated meerkat, only allowing myself to relax once I’d locked on to their manic movements. I had to remember to occasionally wave or smile recognition at my kids once I spotted them, so the people in the park didn’t think I was a particularly brazen paedophile.

Jack quickly struck up a friendship with a slightly older kid who was in the bike-park on a skateboard. At first I had to scrutinise their body language from afar to make sure Jack wasn’t being bullied by a human Bart Simpson. But, no. They were thick as thieves, in that enviable, you-had-me-at-hello way in which kids bond with their peers. I could see that Jack had assumed a leadership role, and was taking charge of their play, in that enthusiastically demanding but wild-eyed and creative way of his. Minutes later, Jack ran up to the hip-high fence, and I walked backwards to meet him, keeping my eyes trained on Chris as he flew down the chute for the fifty-billionth time (with just as much glee as he had the first time).

‘What is it, buddy?’ I asked Jack.

‘Daddy, will you come and play with us? I need some ideas for games.’

I was touched by the request, which probably spoke to the size of my inner child, but I told him I could neither abandon his little brother to fate nor drag him out of his perma-plastic wonderland against his will. ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘You’ve got tonnes of great ideas. I’m sure you’ll think of plenty of things to do.’

Just as Jack ran back to his new best friend, Christopher called me over to the chute, next to which was a little ground-bolted circular table complete with circular-table-bolted stools. He invited me to sit down, then scooped up some bark from the ground. He dropped two equal-sized piles of it on the table, one for me, one for him. ‘Your dinner, daddy,’ he said.

I pretended to eat some.

‘You want some chips?’ he asked. I nodded. Another pile of bark.

‘Tomato ketchup?’ he asked. I nodded, but I was a bit worried about that one. Thankfully he just mimed it.

As we were ‘eating’, a wee girl of similar age to Christopher arrived at my side, watching the proceedings with an expectant look. I offered her my seat. ‘Go on, sweetheart, you two can have dinner together.’

I moved back towards the hip-high fence and watched them with a smile as they played out their teeny-tiny, obliviously-cute approximation of a first date (excuse my heteronormativeness and projections of sexual power structures there). Once they were finished with their ‘meal’, they went off into the park together; spontaneously, wordlessly, operating by a mixture of instinct and telepathy, one following the other, then the other following the one, doing a fleet-footed, whistle-stop tour of the play-park, ninety-nine per cent glee, one per cent attention span. I, of course, had to follow them at a distance; a grumbling chaperone.

Neither of my kids needed me. Sure, they needed me to be physically present, to protect them from the formless dangers that lurked on the periphery of their seemingly safe spaces; to get them home again. But for the first time they didn’t need me to prop up their play, go on the roundabout with them, or join them as they threw sand in the air like confetti. I was pleased for them, but I was also, you know, kind of devastated. I knew this was just a blip. It’s not as though they were about to go off on a gap year or start working at IBM or something. But still. Being a parent is absorbing loss by degree, each new chunk of knowledge they acquire or glimmer of independence they gain taking them further away from you. This felt like one of those moments, and standing inside of it I imagined I could see all the way through to that final moment, when the house is empty of children.

Jack came running towards me, shaking me from my angst. ‘Daaaddddeeeeee!’ he shouted. ‘I need a peeeeeeeeee!’

I helped vault him over two hip-high fences, and stood guard at the side of a tree while he peed, breaking off half-way through to dash back to the park, because Christopher had been abandoned by his new friend (after he’d just cooked her his signature bark dish, too) and was running free and wild down the length of the play-park. Walking back to Jack with Chris in my arms, I thought to myself: ‘Maybe today isn’t one of these moments.’ My kids need me.

And I need them