Time is Fleeting
In the blink of an eye, we go from putting stickers on toys to wondering where all the time went.
I read a couple of interesting statistics over the weekend after seeing a meme post on Facebook and because they felt real, I wanted to find out if they are true – and in an average sense they are. The two statistics are these:
By the time your child reaches 12 years-old, you will have spent around 75% of the time with them you will ever spend.
In six more years, when they reach 18, you will have spent 90% of the time with them you will ever spend.
Reading that made me sad, especially since our baby boy, the youngest of our three, turned 33 years-old in September.
All of this made me sit back and wonder where the time had gone.
Then I realized that I’ll be 65 in a little under three months.
How the hell did that happen? When did I get old?
I guess it is hard for any parent to come to grips with the fact that you are now, at least in the sense of time, a statistically minor part of your children’s lives. Seems strange how my mind compresses that time to a period when they were all under foot and we wished for fewer complications.
I think back to the three little smiles when we were hiking, at a soccer match, or a football, softball, or baseball game or just out playing with our dogs. I miss the unsolicited hugs and the innovatively wrapped Christmas presents. I never forget some of the things we did to make sure the kids had great birthdays and Christmases – I can especially remember putting what felt like 5,000 stickers on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Technodrome (I wasn’t sure I could finish it before Christmas morning) and making a convincing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Halloween costume out of a green garbage can lid, scrap fabric and two homemade wooden katana blades. I remember my daughter and her Beanie Baby, Cabbage Patch and American Girls phases – and when those began to give way to increasingly teenage pursuits.
It wasn’t all fun.
There were some difficult stretches. There were situations that required so much attention and resources from my wife and me that sometimes we had little left over for the kids who weren’t part of the issues – and I will regret those times until I die. I remember how my decisions impacted my wife and kids negatively, how I regret moving from Utah to South Carolina before my youngest’s senior year of high school and taking him away from the friends he had known since elementary school.
I still remember breaking down in tears when our daughter, our oldest child, left for college. Next to my mother-in-law passing, letting go of the first one out of the nest was extremely hard. When we finally found ourselves without children in the house, the silence was painfully deafening. I can remember thinking how could I possibly protect them when I wasn’t there – and from that thought began the process of realizing that we had done our parenting jobs well enough, they didn’t need our protection. It still felt incredibly lonely.
And yet today, I want all of that back. I miss my kids. I would go through all of it again just to have that amazing sense of family once more.
We are blessed with children who want to be around us. Two of my kids live 20 minutes away from our house. Currently, the US Army is getting to decide where our baby boy lives, but I hope he decides to be close when he finishes his tour. We still get to do things with them, and we are as close as we have ever been since they left home to find their own lives.
I love each one of them in only the way a parent can love a child. It doesn’t matter they don’t need our 24-hour attention, they are still our children until we die, so the all-seeing eye of SaurMom (I watched the last two Lord of the Rings movies yesterday) is always upon them.
I guess I’m one of those people who would be just fine with going full Walton’s Mountain with them.
To any readers with little children or are about to have one (or more), pay heed and don’t waste a minute with them. Time is truly fleeting.
That is a beautiful essay.
I’ll make your day! You’re only going to be 65? Grandkid go just as fast. Hope you are blest with a few of those, too.