My sister posted on Facebook this week that she was scared to flip the calendar over to May and I know just how she feels. For her it's the juggle that comes with parenting primary and school aged children alongside work, household and other family responsibilities.

Those struggles are well behind my partner and I, and I marvel still at how we kept all the balls in the air. That rush of school-age parenting years is a particular stage of life that never gets easier as children grow older. In fact, as children age and flex their will and make decisions that can endanger their physical and mental selves, it actually gets harder. Gone is your sweet, baby-faced child and in its place an almost-adult who wants and needs you as much as they hate and are horrified by your very existence.

Then comes a new parenting stage, one very different to the empty-nesting experiences my parents had. Children stay longer, bound in and out as the rugs of life are pulled away and the tests of their independence in a harsher, financially-harder world fall away and fail. As a parent, you walk a fine line between being the open parachute or letting them fly dangerously close, even fall, face-first onto the jagged rocks of adulthood.

I'd argue it's harder to watch. You are always the older and more experienced, but you're also more tired and, depending on your own responses to life events, harder or softer around the edges. And with four children, it always feels like just as one steadies themselves and takes big new strides - with or without our assistance - another buckles at the knees.

So has been the way of things these past few years as the parents of adult children, but it feels like another chapter, unknown in its parameters, is visible. It's a chapter of moving fully into our own plans, of not being as available as we have been - though always within reach to catch should a curve ball be thrown.

We've been moving toward these plans, me with my study, my partner with personal pursuits and a desire to cut back on work. We talk about where we'd like to be living and by what age in our lives we'd like to realise our plans. We talk about dreams abandoned while children were raised and whether we have the same energy and desires to pursue them. We listen to each others fears, from being too far from grandchildren to being close enough to ageing parents. We cross off the things we know we most definitely no longer need in our lives. Mostly we sit with a cup of tea at the end of the day and watch the sun go down knowing the days are few and we need to make the most of them now.

It's fast this life. It's good to know that.