“Boyhood” puts parenting under a magnifying glass. Source: Supplied

It’s by one of my favourite directors, Richard Linklater of the Before Sunrise trilogy, and it’s an unprecedented piece of filmmaking, shot over 12 consecutive years with an unknown actor who’s six when the story opens and 18 when it concludes.

Mostly I want to see it because it’s about nothing more and nothing less than a child growing up.

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The film begins with six-year-old Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, lying on the grass staring up at the sky. For the next 165 minutes, like an Attenborough documentary but with dialogue, you watch a boy grow into a man. Softness gives way to sharpness, innocence becomes knowledge, and in a single child we see life at its most mundane and profound.

The movie, opening in Australia on September 4, resonates because it is every parent’s story: missing socks, sibling skirmishes, bike rides, frustration, searing love and a conversation that rises and falls as surely as breath, and which you hope will never end.

We need “Boyhood” because the joy of being a parent is not a story we hear much anymore. The new narrative arc tells of how wearying it is, how complicated. Everything related to child rearing is pitched as a conundrum — how to discipline, how to prevent entitlement, how to pay for them, how to balance work and home, how to carve out some “me” time.

Ever noticed how most conversations about Tony Abbott’s Paid Parental Leave scheme rarely reference children? Only when the outside world gets ugly, or you momentarily mislay a child or they dart across a busy road do we pull them close and bury our noses in their very being.

Tony Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme is controversial ... although he doesn’t seem too bothered. Source: News Limited

As the child free lobby grows louder, parents seem content to concede their relevance. When Adelaide’s Ben Mahoney founded a club called “No kids, no worries” which only welcomes people without children, he was effectively saying parents are a tedious life form to be laughed at because of our car stickers, plastic containers and aversion to late nights. Actually, the sneers at those stickers may be warranted.

I’m not the least bit interested in stoking a confected battle between the child-blessed/burdened and the child-free, although I’d love to know how Mahoney’s Friday night pub get-togethers are going a month from now. But I fear in this new world, where personal freedom is the holy grail, it’s becoming almost frowned upon to say how badly you want kids and how central they are to the map many of us sketch of our lives.

Thanks to contraception, women’s agency in the workplace and the visibility of various lifestyle choices. There’s no longer a presumption that everyone wants kids. That’s fine, but with infertility so widespread, young women in particular need to hear optimistic stories of parenting, so it once again becomes a bold life choice, not an unspoken regret silently ticking away to the tune of their biological clocks.

Ellar Coltrane in “Boyhood”. Source: Supplied

At 31, children were always my tomorrow. To be honest, they were probably my next year or, if I could wing it, my next decade. But my GP, a young woman on top of the research, had no truck with that.

“Do you want children?” she asked, during a brief visit home from the northern hemisphere where I didn’t just do my job, I was my job. It was an uncomfortable conversation, but she persevered. “You have to think now about what you want and plan for it,” she said firmly. “If you start before you’re 35 it’ll be easier.”

She forced me to think, and for that I will always be grateful. Because as retro as it sounds, children have fulfilled me. I am no less ambitious, no less interested in the world, but my days dance to the melody of their voices whether they’re arguing over hairbrushes or calling out “ILY” as they slam the front door.

Whoa, check out those computers. Source: Supplied

Initially, parenthood afforded a glorious re-immersion in innocence. But as the glacial pace, the groundhoggedness of the toddler years has given way to the gallop of adolescence, the love is just as fierce and consuming. As they grow, there’s more to like — their idiosyncrasies, humour, their company. I also like the woman they have made me; that I am theirs. Always.

A friend, trapped in the turnstile that is IVF, says the urge for children is anchored in wanting someone to love more than herself. “It’s about wanting something brand new, that you create together, that takes you to new depths of love, loyalty, passion, fear. It’s wanting to feel everything that’s out there for the taking.”

And then she emails a line from an E.E. Cummings poem: “It’s about going ‘somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience.’”

“Boyhood”, according to those who’ve seen it, is a film you’re still thinking about days later. Its appeal is as much in the ordinary as the extraordinary. Fitting really, since that is the essence of parenting.

Email: angelamollard@gmail.com

Twitter: @angelamollard