The other day, I spotted a pile of magazines in my living room that looked as if it had been in the same spot for months. Travel & Leisure, Travel 50 & Beyond, Town & Country Travel, Departures – a few months’ worth of each. These were the same magazines my husband and I used to fight to read first when we were newly married.

Now we ignore them. Reading them is like shopping in Paris when the dollar is weak and the euro strong. What’s the point?

The magazines pile up, but neither of us has the heart to cancel the subscriptions. That would somehow officially acknowledge the fact that with our fourth child due in six weeks, we aren’t going hiking from inn to inn in Iceland any time soon.

Now, I know that in this very column I’ve written about the feasibility of traveling with children, and even about how leaving the children every once and a while for a real vacation can really restore a marriage.

But as for Butterfield & Robinson’s brand-new eight-day trek through rugged Iceland, featuring black lava flows, iceberg-filled lagoons, hot springs, and hikes under the midnight sun – I think it will have to wait. Whereas before I had children such a magazine feature would inspire me to pick up the telephone and find out more details about the trip, now I begin to picture myself in my A solo hiking boots, my Lowe Alpine backpack, and my … Baby Bjorn? I quickly put the magazine back where I found it.

At the Korean manicurist the other day (chosen for her lightning speed – exactly 12 minutes from start to finish), I sat next to a woman who was pregnant with her first child. When she asked me to name the biggest challenge she was about to face, I told her that from the moment we become parents, our relationship with time is totally altered. It no longer belongs to us in a way that it did before we had children.

“You know how now you can read for an hour when you wake up on Sunday, and then roll out of bed, take a hot shower, make some eggs, and run an errand? When you have a child, you will wake up when she wakes up, and think about how you are going to get that one errand done,” I told her. Enjoying a leisurely lunch, staying up late to finish a book, working out for an extra half hour – with the birth of a child, these simple pleasures shift from routine to luxury.

When you’re back at work, out running errands, or out with one child but not all of them, you are always thinking about how you need to get back home. How long has it been since you’ve seen your child? How much longer before you are back together? That umbilical cord may be cut at birth, but there is no better likeness to the reality of the relationship between parent and child than two people connected by a cord.

The woman I was talking to looked at me blankly. And I realized that she must have felt like I did when my husband tried to tell me how to drive a car with a manual transmission. “You gradually lift your right foot off the gas and at the same time put your left foot on the clutch. You change gears and then lift your foot off the clutch and put your foot back on the gas.” Until you are behind the steering wheel yourself, having the information is almost meaningless.

Recently I had lunch with a friend of mine in her 60s who has children in their 40s. When the waiter came by to take our dessert order, I told her that I didn’t have time for coffee – I had to get home. She smiled knowingly. “You know, even years and years after all the kids had left home, I still would get that pit in my stomach and wonder what time it was and what the kids were doing, and how long I had been away for,” she said. Even now, she told me, more than 25 years later, she still feels the knot occasionally.

One of the nicest parts about raising kids in the city is that you never are – or certainly never feel – very far away from them. People in the suburbs have to drive 15 minutes to get milk. We New Yorkers need only walk to the corner to get groceries. There might be traffic to get to Midtown, but the office is probably no more than a mile or a few from our children’s school.

Even still, time away from the responsibilities of children and home and work feel precious. When I was left alone with one child for two days and a night not long ago, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to read Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code.” It was at the height of the frenzy around the book, and I was a bit miffed to be so out of the loop. Was the ending really weak? How many of the book’s theories were based in reality?

And so I benignly neglected my 2-year-old as much as I could, breezing through the airy book. She played with a puzzle and dressed and undressed doll after doll while I read. I sat at the edge of the tub flipping pages while she splashed in the bath. What a pleasure, I thought. Until I realized that for about two seconds I hadn’t heard a splash. I looked up from my book and down at the bath just in time to see her little head slip under the water. I forked her out before she was under the water for even a second, and like a good third child, she was happily splashing again a moment later. But this time I was playing right alongside her. “The Da Vinci Code” could wait.

Lots of things can wait, which doesn’t mean it’s painless to let them. Just because it’s easy and obvious to choose your children as the priority, it doesn’t make the loss of freedom any less complicated.