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Time Flies When You’re a Parent
I just cut my food bill in half using this one simple trick.
I just cut my food bill in half using this one simple trick.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I dropped our teenage son off at college. As I write this, he’s currently eating his way through a meal plan that, by my math, almost counts as a scholarship in and of itself. I feel like I’ve unleashed a tapeworm into the bowels of the New Jersey State College system: Sure, I might be getting overcharged on books, but I’m getting my revenge one chimichanga at a time.
Our household has been reduced from 5 to 4, but when you factor in his guitar and accordion, and the volume at which he played classic movies in the media room, it feels like we’ve actually lost several dozen people from the family.
Just like an alien spaceship in a bad science fiction movie, my house is now quiet—a little too quiet. I find myself longing for what our mornings looked like last year, when my then 14-year-old daughter, a worrier who hates to be late for anything, would be shouting invective that cannot be reproduced here without hurting her chances at one day becoming a Supreme Court Justice, because they hadn’t left for school yet and my son had chosen that exact moment to try to perfect a riff on his guitar.
The background noise of a family in the thick of it, with kids old enough to go school and who have schedules fuller than my mouth once Gobbler season starts back up at Wawa, begins to become like the buzz of a city. When it starts to ebb, you realize that this thing you spent so much time complaining about was actually a weighted blanket for your soul. It gets hard to sleep. You start to wonder why no one is playing music full-volume while taking a shower at three o’clock in the morning anymore.
And this reduction is just starting for us. In less than three years, my middle daughter will be leaving. And by the time we elect our first robot President, Harry Truman Bot 1.0, in 2036, my youngest will be knee-deep in her sophomore year.
I try to take some solace in the fact that, with the current state of the economy, all of my kids will eventually have to return to us, at least for a little bit—unless President Bot 1.0 really delivers on their campaign promises!
But it won’t ever be the same. The treadmill my wife and I are currently on has started to slow down, and nothing is going to speed it back up again. What seemed like the forever-normal of the five of us, running to band practice, play practice, lacrosse practice, basketball practice, track practice, and—oh, wait, none of our kids run track, we went to the wrong practice, maybe we should be attending practice practice—was really just a little, decade-long blip. Most of the time, we were too tired to even see it go by.
Have you ever binge-watched a sitcom you grew up with? In your memory, it was always the same group of people facing different challenges every week, and the status quo was always set back to zero by the end of the half hour. But when you gulp it down in one uninterrupted stream during a three-day-weekend you swore you would spend cleaning out the garage, it becomes clear that the kids were always getting older, the clock was always ticking, and the end was closer than you ever imagined the first time through.
I write all this not to be depressing—life is depressing, I’m just accurately reporting on it—but as a warning to all the parents younger than me, 20 years or so behind on the journey I’m two-thirds of the way through: You need to take a breath and try to snapshot, in your mind, these moments you’re gifted inside the glorious, vibrating (sometimes stinging!) beehive of parenthood.
And you have the perfect time quickly approaching: Halloween. If your son is still young enough to enjoy putting on a costume and your daughter isn’t old enough yet to try to give you a heart attack with what she wants to wear to school that day, you’re in a precarious Goldilocks zone that will be gone sooner than it takes for you to finish all the Kit Kats from this year’s haul.
I urge you to hold their little hands and try to borrow the shout-filled excitement they have for the houses that give out full-sized bars (also, please send those addresses to me at jay@jayblack.tv), and live, with all of your might, in that moment. Because, while Halloween is scary, the sound of a quiet house is much, much scarier.
