Blink of an Eye

"Enjoy this time - it will go by in the blink of an eye".  I remember hearing with a snarl - this statement seemingly on infinite loop - infant children dripping from my appendages and dragging the months out like groundhog day.  So many blinks came and went and still there I was turning around my sensible car in the morning to get stealthy food and spit up off of my work clothes.  It seemed possibly the longest blink of an eye in all of history.

Yet all of the sudden I find myself flipping through albums, looking behind with fondness and ahead with the terror of childhood's end in sight.  And I wonder when time stopped dragging like it once did, when time instead became a race. We live on both sides of this crazy coin - we want more time with our kids but wish summer break would end.  We anticipate birthdays with joy and can't wait until the ruckus settles.   I realized just this past winter break as I was looking forward to its end just as I had its beginning, that I have made a grave error.  That I have focused my life on the wrong part of the plea "Enjoy this time - it will go by in the blink of an eye".  I have focused on the time and too often forgotten the enjoyment.  

We people hate to age but we do.  Our kids get pimples and then go to college.  We want to resist and deny and lengthen.  We Americans had 14.6 million plastic surgeries last year to hide time's passage.  We believe so firmly that we can slow time that sometimes we chase it instead of embracing it.   

I used to color my hair and loved it.  I had stripes, platinum, burgundy, copper, coffee, colored from the salon, the grocery store, really whatever—you name it, I’ve sported it.  In the last two years I have quit.  An intentional try at acceptance and acknowledgement of the passage of time.  I have four kids.  They are becoming teenagers.  And me, I am running around trying to hide grey as soon as it pops up just minutes after I implore my kids to accept themselves.  My dash to color over the passage of time was stripping me of the space to enjoy the time.  

And so it is that I redouble my efforts to truly enjoy the passage of time and to do away with my own diseased desperation to keep it from ticking.  I redouble my efforts to accept time and to reject my resentment of it.  I redouble my efforts to live happily and authentically knowing that perhaps I can't stall time but I can revel in its passage.  Because while their childhood is achingly short it is a gift that I want to give back to them, so that when they are adults and they blink their eyes they don't see a rush or a hustle to cram life into limited minutes but they see the happy sighs, breezy snuggles, mindless trampoline bounces, the laughs and the hugs, and they stop a minute, slow down, and try to give that gift again to their children.

I Can Justify It

Hit me with anything.  I can justify it.   Seriously.  We need a giant TV to save our family’s eyesight and to enhance our meaningful movie viewing opportunities.  Also we don’t need a giant TV because we don’t really use it that much and there are many better uses for the money.  Go ahead – try me.  Give me something outrageous.  A 3^rd puppy?  You got it.  We need a 3^rd puppy because one dog is older and one day will be dead so eventually we will just have two and that will be less sad than one.  But we don’t need a 3^rd puppy because we already have a house with 11 beating hearts and 12 is stretching the boundaries of insanity.  Impressive, right?

I’m not sure if I have always had this amazing skill or if it has come as part of the package labeled “welcome to parenthood” but I am the self proclaimed justification   master.  There is only one problem with this brand of wizardry.  Being capable of justifying anything in the entire world means that you are totally wrong much of the time.   Did you realize that being a grown up meant that you’d be wrong a whole lot of the time?  Not because you weren’t smart or were ill prepared, just because it turns out there isn’t really a “right”…?

Let me illuminate with a simple example.   My house needs to be painted.  That is really really expensive.  And I don’t really really have the money for it.  I know that in a year when it’s spring again and the carpenter bees and rain have had their ways with the exterior of my home it will just be a worse and more costly.  But I think… people go for decades without painting their house.  Mine isn’t close to that bad.  I’d rather use the money to take a vacation that my kids will remember forever and will build our family rather than paint a house that could be painted anytime.  See that?  I’m not painting the house, you know that’s true.  And that is probably a terrible decision. 

But what happens when the decisions have more weight than a rotted board of siding?  If you are a parent you know what I mean.  Everything is something important.  We just chose a high school for my daughter.  My pro and con list was a joke – every school could enhance her life and every school could jeopardize her future.  Every school was a great bargain in some ways and every school was way too expensive.  I could justify pretty much any option.   But decisions must be made, priorities must be created, judgement and restraint must be exercised. 

Decisions, priorities, judgement, restraint?  Yep.  That’s the stuff that this parenting gig is made of.  Don’t let anyone tell you differently.  It’s not really diapers and ballet lessons – that’s the simple stuff.  It’s research and learning and listing and deciding.  It’s choosing a path, walking the path, and making hard tradeoffs to stay on that path.  Because even though you and I, especially I, can justify pretty much anything; you and I, especially I, know that every single choice is right and every single choice is wrong.  

And  so what do we parent types do?  We debate and discuss and list and then we close our eyes and freefall into decision after decision, trying to look like we knew just what we were doing - hoping that we have done what was best, hoping it “all works out in the end”.   Justify as we may, we will never really know.   And this weakness, this never knowing, this ability to justify anything and sit with our hands wrung and fingers and toes crossed, is why we each raise our kids differently.  I like to assume that everyone can justify just like I can – and I have no idea what goes into anyone’s choices.  So as crazy as mine look to you, yours look to me – so be content, be confident and justify away, I won’t judge – I know it’s all a shot in the dark. 

Equal But Opposite Reaction

I had a discussion with my teenage child in the car this morning about the good ol' days.  About what it was like to literally have nothing to do.  I don’t mean wishing that you could do something that you weren't allowed to do like play on a computer or watch a show or text your friends, I mean literally sitting on a stump in the woods looking at tree bark with no idea what could come next.  She was, in her own words, "flabbergasted that this could happen to a person".  

I continued this review of my life's apparently banal history by sharing that the songs on the radio that we hear now are completely shocking. Granted, our songs were shocking to our parents and our slow dances were much too close for parents who had pioneered dances that resembled swimming.  But have you heard the radio?  If not you should know that songs have the word SEX actually IN them plus more.  Again, this teen couldn’t fathom what type of songs ours might have been, ones that didn’t describe intimate sexy stuff in detail.  What good might those be?  Where's the fun?

We talked a bit (it is a very long drive) about how this whole parenting digital children thing is overwhelming – that while I can guess at the right things to do, like spying and managing time and using computers in public spaces, I don’t actually know for sure that these are the right things.   "Maybe you should buy a handbook" she said.  "Who would write the handbook – no one knows the answers" I said.  Cause it's true -  we are all muddling through this together anxiously awaiting the day that the handbook is published.

All of this discussion left her at carpool walking away from the car hysterical laughing at my sad electronic free childhood and amazed at the concept that a tape player could be in a car.  As for me I felt sort of antique.  I turned to the internet for answers to discover that among all of that information, there are very few answers.  For every article about limiting screen time there is one about the value of time spent learning to navigate the digital world.  I just read an article about why a messy bedroom is good for kids and then right below it... yep, an article about why it’s important for kids to learn to keep a tidy room. 

So we navigate in little worried parenting silos and toss opinions and new research around over coffees to validate our best guesses but basically we just do our best, follow our gut, find inspirational quotes, hope that we aren’t messing it all up.  Because we are writing the handbook and doing the research… right now and how bizarre that right this moment there aren’t really right or wrong answers.  The opportunity sounds awesome, right?  The risk sounds terrifying too – that every single parental approach that I can think of I can also discover an opposite approach that has some shards of merit. 

I guess this is the handbook-less generation that we have but sometimes I wish there was a roadmap away from nasty song lyrics and backlit screens and into the boring days of stump sitting and bark staring, it sure seems simple about now.