Later this month my brothers and I will be going to Chicago to watch our beloved St. Louis Blues take on the Blackhawks. My wife will be watching our kids that weekend, so to even things out, she asked me if it would be OK for her to take a weekend trip with her sister. I said I thought that was a great idea, but as I drove her to the airport, she wondered aloud, “am I a bad parent?”
I understood where those doubts were coming from. As a corporate lawyer, she doesn’t get to spend much time with our kids except on the weekends. The kids are growing up so fast, she said, and I could see she felt like any weekend not spent with them was somehow wasted.
No, I told her, you’re not bad parent. I’ve been a stay-at-home dad since our twins were born ten years ago. I’ve spent countless hours with our kids, and I also feel like they’re growing up too fast. I think all parents feel that way, I told her. For us grown-ups, time seems to fly by.
But not for kids. Their minds are still growing, and there’s so much to learn that it’s like every second stretches to fit it all in. As adults we mainly just get by on the categories and labels we’ve learned to apply over the years, but kids are still open to so much more. In terms of its emotional depth and richness, our kids’ experience of day-to-day life is like a poem. Ours is a grocery list.
You might think that your kids are growing up so fast, and that you haven’t been able to spend the kind of time with them that you wanted to. For some people that may be true. But I suspect that from your kids’ point of view, they’ve had ages with you. And they’re grateful for that, or at least they will be one day, when they’ve had a chance to think about it with the wisdom of hindsight.
So don’t beat yourself up. And every now and then, take some time for yourself, to refresh and recharge. Breaking out of our routines and experiencing something new is healthy in part because it re-connects us to the richness of experience. You might even say it helps us recapture the feeling of what it’s like to be a child. And if that means that when you get back, you appreciate the time with your kids even more, it will have been more than worth it.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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