My youngest child still manages to fill a just-moments-ago empty laundry basket to the brim by dint of "cleaning" her room, but as I realized fighting tears over this weekend's laundry, at some point this too will stop.

Let me be clear: I will not miss doing piles of laundry, per se, any more than I miss having to cut grapes in half or comb out everyone's hair looking for lice or figure out how to make dinner for five people on very different schedules, when the youngest will only eat chicken nuggets or grilled cheese, the eldest wants beef with every meal and the middle child is now a vegetarian.

What I will miss is what the absence of those tasks implies. We mark so many of our children's firsts, but aside from various graduation ceremonies, we rarely even notice the lasts.

The last time we gave them a bath, heaved them onto our shoulders, picked them up at all. The last night we tucked them in, read a story, played the Tooth Fairy. The final night/early morning in which our sleep was shattered by the appearance of a young person announcing they had wet the bed, had a nightmare or needed $5 for a field trip.

I remember quite vividly the daily grind of getting three children out of bed, dressed, fed, combed and in possession of backpacks and lunches while I gulped down coffee and wondered just how long I could keep this up.

How long did I keep it up? I honestly don't know. These days, as I hear my 17-year-old respond to her own alarm, make her own lunch and head out the door with only a quick word or hug from her mother, I can't remember the day, or even the year, that early-morning madness stopped.

No doubt it was a gradual change — my eldest children are just two years apart, but there's a six-year age gap between the middle and third child. There was certainly a final day of assembling three lunches and dropping three children off at school.

Except I did not know that then, any more than I was able to mark the last time each of my children climbed into my lap, the last time I told them to brush their teeth, the last argument over homework or sleepovers, the last look at a family room covered with discarded shoes, hoodies, school papers, books and crumpled snack wrappers and the last yell, "Everyone get in here and pick up your stuff!"

OK, a version of that might have actually happened over Christmas, but you get what I'm saying.

So much of what we do as parents is exhausting, irritating and occasionally terrifying and/or infuriating. When we are in the midst of it, surrounded by people who are, in fact, utterly dependent on us, it seems endless. I remember thinking that I would never have the time to read a book or take a shower without interruption, never be able to sit down for more than two minutes, or lie down at all, without at least two small bodies appearing out of nowhere to hurl themselves upon me.

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