There is a particular kind of parenting milestone that no book prepares you for. Not the first steps. Not the first day of school. This one arrives quietly, unannounced, in the form of a completely reasonable request — and lands like a small philosophical bomb.
Last week, my daughter asked me to change the desktop wallpaper on the old computer I had given her.
Some context: she is eight years old, in third grade, and this machine — a perfectly capable older laptop running Linux, naturally — had been handed over as her creative territory. For drawings. For school projects. For whatever she decides to invent on any given afternoon. The wallpaper, as it happened, was unicorn-themed. Rainbows, sparkles, the full mythological fanfare.
She asked me to change it.
I asked her why.
And this is what followed — I'll translate from Italian, which is how we live:
"Dad, you should know. I hate unicorns."
I blinked. "Since when? You used to love them."
"Since I became grown up."
A reasonable enough statement, if slightly alarming. So I asked the obvious follow-up.
"And when exactly did that happen?"
She answered without hesitation.
"When I turned eight and a half."
I want to be clear: she said this with the full authority of someone who has reviewed the evidence and reached an unambiguous conclusion. Not with pride, not with defiance — just with the calm certainty of someone stating a fact. The sky is blue. Rome is the capital of Italy. I am now grown up. I hate unicorns.
Eight. And. A. Half.
I am sixty-nine years old. I have lived through a few chapters: military service as a paratrooper, decades in aviation, journalism, wine education. I summited Kilimanjaro. I have been raising a child essentially alone, starting at sixty-one. I thought I had developed a reasonably robust capacity for surprise.
I had not accounted for the eight-and-a-half transformation.
What strikes me — genuinely, not just as a punchline — is the complete absence of any transition. No warning. No memo. No gradual cooling of enthusiasm for things with horns and sparkles. One morning, unicorns are the organizing principle of an entire aesthetic universe. The next morning, they never existed. And apparently, you should know this.
This is, I suspect, universal. Every parent of an eight-year-old, or a twelve-year-old, or a fifteen-year-old has lived a version of this moment. The phase that ended without announcement. The obsession that simply stopped being an obsession. The morning the poster came down.
What's slightly different in my case is the arithmetic. When you are sixty-one years older than your child, you watch these moments with a particular mixture of amusement and — I'll be honest — acceleration. You're aware, in a way that perhaps younger parents aren't yet, that the phases go fast. That eight and a half arrives before you notice eight has settled in.
The unicorns are gone. Something else will take their place.
I'm paying attention.