There’s still a thrill in finding a black-and-white photo and seeing someone has written names and dates on its reverse

FOR SOME IT’S FIRST THING on the first morning of each new year, or last thing on the day before. For others, September, perhaps – the end of summer, the start of the new academic year. It’s an occasion to mark the passage of time. For me, it’s a day in spring, and a day in autumn. I climb into the attic, shout ‘stand back’ and then, one by one, I drop them onto the landing below.

The black binbags land with a soft ‘whump’, watched by eight, bright eyes. Then I climb down and we set to. It is the best fun. And it also breaks my heart. I never set out to take stock of life on the days that I sort through my children’s wardrobes with them, but it’s happened that way. Once it becomes inevitable that a season is properly on the turn, bundles of clothing are gathered, marked by age for wear by the next-in-line, bade farewell and stored again.

And then, out of the bags from the attic come memories.

For many, their children’s toys become precious keepsakes, and there are certain friends – a stuffed lamb, a battered bear – which will always be part of our family. I also keep soft little locks of hair, and treasure every photo and video, grateful that every second can be documented so easily – although there is still a deep thrill in finding an ancient black and white photo and seeing that someone from long ago has written names and dates on its reverse.

But for me, my children’s clothes are more evocative than any photograph, and opening the carefully labelled bags from the attic is to release bursts of memories. Seaside holidays, walks in autumn leaves, Christmases, birthday parties and first days at school – flashbacks to their phases, loves and hates, tears and joy. There’s the little stains that are reminders of clumsy self-feeding, a wornout knee from a game of ponies played for days across the living room floor.

I cannot touch a babygro without feeling it morph; fill out and become warm and softly heavy in my hands again, making me long to hold and smell the infants that wore it in turn. Every washed-out pyjamas, pairs of worn tights, all the cotton leggings – the past made physical, quite literally the fabric of memories.

Sometimes I wish that life could be lived differently, travelled through parallel timelines; or that we could be multiple versions of ourselves so we could always have a presence at each stage – being able to nurse your infant to sleep on demand, stroking their downy hair, their wizened newborn hands springing open at your touch; while at the same time hearing your toddler’s voice – every funny name that they invent for everyday things that you’ve forgotten, or singing their nursery rhymes as they hear them; ‘Rock-a-by-Baby’ ; ‘Baa-Baa-BlackSheep’ .

I wish that I could be in the present and the past with them, while still steering them toward the future. I want it all again as well as still to come.

There won’t be any more babies in this house – my family is complete, and for that I am truly grateful. So from here on in, there will always be a bag that has reached the end of the line and has to go. I won’t again retrieve the tiny Roo hat that they all wore as newborns; it will be farewell too to the little t-shirts to which they gave names like ‘Flowers’, ‘Lady’ or ‘Ireland’, reminders of summers past.

Some items will be passed on, while some are too threadbare and worn. My eldest will even be the beneficiary of an all-new wardrobe – reminding me that she is moving on to new things, and that my first little baby is gone forever.

However, there is also excitement in that newness. I wonder, by the next time I go through the bags, what they will have learned or achieved? What new skills they’ll possess?

In as much as I long to revisit the past, the growth of my daughters delights and astounds me, their achievements fill me fit to burst with pride, possibilities endless for their futures.

The change of wardrobe might mean nothing more than a mountain of laundry to some. I treat it like a solemn rite of passage – for me, certainly not for the four little girls who will burst through the knees or spill melted ice-cream down the fronts of what comes out of those bags. For a day or two, I allow myself that maternal lament : where has it all gone and why so fast? I take stock, and dwell in the past, indulge myself in a sort of beautiful melancholy. And then I let it go, because they are too brilliant to do otherwise.

And so I watch them in their new(ish) clothes, the sleeves slightly too long, the ends of trousers turned up, eagerly pitching forward, unaware, into the future, to whatever that will bring for them.