Why Now?

Time with our Children

Z is at the amazing age that involves wanting to spend every waking moment with Dad....running football receiving plays in the yard, playing "Uno Sorry" (a game they invented using Uno cards and a Sorry game board), watching the latest Star Wars season on Disney+, playing Ping Pong...you name it.

S is at the stage where she is not ready to be "away" from us and still wants to be "near" us (which means she is in the house but quite often in her room with a closed door between her and the rest of us).

Fortunately the two of them are growing into the stage of having sibling chats each night before bedtime, making pancakes together on Saturday morning, and being able to agree on which movie they'll watch on Saturday afternoon. Ahhh, the maturation. Thank God.

The closer S gets to her high school graduation date, the more I am reminded that this time is temporary...fleeting. Anytime someone mentions "graduation" the kids glance at me expectantly to see if I'm going to cry, followed by whispered advice..."Shhh don't talk about it in front of Mom!" If only I could put off the day when she leaves us and goes out into the world on her own.

At the thought of either of them going out into the world on his or her own, I am faced with the realization that maybe they are not yet ready. Maybe I haven't prepared them enough, or taught them the skills they'll need. I search Pinterest for "Skills kids should learn" and find hundreds of checklists that simultaneously inventory all the skills needed by certain ages and confirm my failure as a mother. Sigh. My kids don't know how to balance a checkbook or sew on a button. If they didn't spend so much time calculating the velocity of trains headed toward each other at various rates of speed maybe I could teach them a few skills. Actually probably more accurately: If I didn't spend so much time cooking/cleaning, managing our belongings, or driving the kids to tutoring and swim lessons (a skill!) I might have more time and energy to teach them these things.

As an optimist I am wired to look at the bright side of things, so keep that in mind when I say this: The good thing about the pandemic was that many of these time-consuming activities were cancelled for months. No swim lessons, no driving to tutoring; no weekend days taken up by birthday parties or weekend trips out of town; and shopping was replaced by online ordering and curbside pickup.

In "The Tail End" Tim Urban laid out the stark reality that by the time he graduated from high school, he had spent 93% of the time he would ever have with his parents. "I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood. Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years. When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. If I lay out the total days I’ll ever spend with each of my parents—assuming I’m as lucky as can be—this becomes starkly clear: It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end."

It seems as though traveling is family tradition...my Dad traveled with his sister and parents to Europe one summer during college. My grandmother (his mother) passed away just a few years later. Mom traveled with her parents the summer after college when her father was the Middle East Commander in the U.S. Navy. Mom and I traveled through Scotland for a few weeks during the summer after my college graduation.

That "quality time" is one of our intentions for this quest. If I think about 'how can I spend the most quality time with my kids,' the thoughts lead to barriers. Work and school take up a large chunk of our waking hours. What if we didn't work for a while? What if we condensed school time down from 7 hours to the minimum (maybe that many in a week?) by homeschooling or some version of it? What would we do? Why would we stay in New Jersey if we were unencumbered by geography? [This is a question many New Jerseyans ask themselves on a regular basis.] Where would we go? What would we do?

We would do THIS.