I am struggling with the melancholy feeling I get when my kids decide to sell off what I thought were their prized possessions. Stuff they “had to have!” Stuff they and others bought at full retail (only for a child do I or anyone I know still pay full retail).

Their willingness to let go is both inspiring and disquieting. Inspiring because it is their little business minds at work. Selling what they no longer desire or use to acquire the cash to get what they will use, or at least desire today. I bite my tongue and do not tell them that what they desire today will be their Ebay fodder of tomorrow.

Disquieting because to them, letting go of their stuff is the only way they know how to trade up. To me, it is letting go of a part of their youth that I will never be able to recapture. The part of them that was satisfied with Sponge Bob and actual wire cables that connect them to their friends’ machines. Everything moves and changes so fast. From wires to wireless, from friendly penguins to army missions and guns, their childhood, their interests, their world is changing so quickly. And these game machines, along with my ability to hold their hands in public, have gone by the way of, “Mom, I’m waaaay too old for that.”

Still, my need to see them as they were will never vanish, even as I relish who they are becoming. And those fleeting moments when they slip back into the little boys I dearly cherish in my heart and (gasp!) grab my hand to hold it for a brief moment, will never, ever, be able to be traded up, traded in, or sold for any amount of money on Ebay.