We had kids in the house again. It was a trip back in time. One forgets what it’s like to share bathrooms and use all those dishes.
Our children floated back home to live on and off as young adults between school and jobs, but they’ve been gone for a while. Now they live in far-flung places and getting them together is not common. Abby was here from Bogota, Colombia, and Ezra from Denver. We spent time with Anna who is comparatively close in Rochester.
As for the time with kids, as they say, the days are long, and the years are short.
Having kids at home as adults is interesting. There are remnants of them being a kid, and they might as well be eight again as you explain something to them. Then a while later, they are teaching you something that they learned out in the big world.
You each carry a bag full of memories around the house. It’s the same memories, but wildly different in the perspective of parent and child. We had time to compare notes about those memories. There are things I would do differently if I were raising them again. That’s the same for any large task we might do. We aren’t perfect people; we aren’t going to be perfect parents.
Our children seem not to have been too damaged by their upbringing, so I took heart in that.
One evening I was driving with Abby and Ezra, and they began debating whether each was more like mom or dad. What qualities had they inherited from each of us?
They included their older sister in the evaluations. I was not part of the conversation. It was like I wouldn’t be capable of understanding what it’s like to be one of our children. Which I’m not.
While they were home, we spent time with relatives and friends who have little kids. Observing parents with young children is exhausting. To a certain age, kids demand the full-time attention of someone older. You forget that. They don’t know much at ages 2 or 3. What they do know is just enough to get themselves into trouble.
I knew these parents as little kids, so it was coming full circle to see them chase around their own. I noticed how a parent of that aged child has the ability to carry on an adult conversation at the same time they are tracking their little one. It’s as if a young parent can be two people at once.
So, I was around children who were children and adults who I knew as children. I wondered, in 20 years, how will these kids evaluate the qualities they inherited from their mom and dad. Twenty years seems long. But it depends if you are counting by long days or short years.
In these gatherings, it was common for someone to pull out their phone and take pictures or video. Mostly these were of the children who are gosh-darn cute, except for the occasional meltdown close to nap time. Nobody wants a video of that.
I could probably count on two hands the black and white photos there are of me as a child: Baptism, First Communion, holidays. A few friends’ parents had 8-millimeter cameras. Most of the film I’ve seen from that time are seconds long.
I don’t how well all these things on phones will be preserved. But there is the potential that children today will have many hours of video of them in their growing-up years.
What would it be like to see so much of your young self?
If one watched hours of film of yourself as a toddler, could you figure some things out about the adult you became?
All this touches on the debate of nature vs. nurture. We owe our physical selves to genes we got from our parents. But what of our personality? In the car, Abby and Ezra were assigning qualities from my wife and I that each of them had as if it were a draft. “You got this. Okay, I got this.”
It’s not what you think about when you have young kids. You’re just trying to get everyone fed, the dishes done, and the kids to bed. But it is in those busy and often chaotic moments that parents are teaching. Ninety nine percent of teaching goes on when we aren’t thinking about teaching.
Spending time with current and former kids, I was reminded how valuable childhood is. It’s only a part of our life, one we can’t remember much, but it sets us up for everything that follows.
We are equal in that we all have a childhood, and we only get one. Childhoods are not equal though. Being a child in a safe, loving, enriching environment can’t be overvalued. We agree that every child deserves that. Sadly, not every child will have that. There are many reasons that can go wrong.
As a society, we need to do what we can to buffer the bad situations. That’s why thoughtful, reasoned discussion about housing, hunger, and healthcare are important. We should expect that of our leaders, not the cantankerous arguing we seem to get lately.
A child who is intentionally harmed and their childhood damaged is beyond sad. I can’t unsee the pictures Abby has sent from Gaza where over 10,000 children have been murdered. Those are children who had nothing to do with October 7th.
I am deeply Catholic, but the horrors of the abuse scandal can’t be put into words. There have been apologies and retribution, but those have come haltingly. The work of healing needs to continue. All of us need to envision a better way to be a church going forward. That is just beginning.
Abby and Ezra flew to their homes on Monday. It’s back to Pam, me, and two cats. We’re a little tired and a little sad.