A day in the life of a year

A birthday is coming.

Photo by Luca Upper on Unsplash

We’re all getting older every day, but only once a year do we feel it quite so acutely.

A birthday means the number changes; mine is coming in a few days, even though I swear I just had one.

It’s not a round number milestone, but it’s more than enough to get me thinking often about relative time, life and death.

There’s a good chance I’ve lived more than half my life; with any luck, I haven’t lived half my adult life yet.

When I think of what it was like to be 18, a freshman in college 30 years ago, it feels distant. It feels like a lot of life has happened since then — that it has taken a long time to get to the cusp of 48.

But I also know the years feel like they come faster now even if the days feel longer — a symptom of parenthood they try to warn you about, but it’s just one of the 482 million things you won’t really know until you experience it yourself.

Consider this, then, a meditation on time.

As you have kids, you come to realize that the reason the days are long but the years are short is that time is less and less yours. It is given and shared, often in wonderful ways, but far less of it is spent on exactly what you would otherwise do. My wife and I function as steady objects around which our kids’ worlds orbit, and I often function as a central hub of sorts: the maker of meals, the runner of errands, the organizer and transporter.

There is a mental load to this work that bends time in strange ways. There is also both 1) a repetitiveness to it and 2) an unbelievable time drain when you have children (they shall remain anonymous) who can make a 35-minute chore of brushing their teeth, try on seven different shirts until they are late for school or insist on a 23-activity weekend.

This past weekend my wife was attending a conference. I was in full dad mode, transporting our oldest and youngest to a trunk-or-treat extravaganza in-between dropping off and picking up our middle child at a water park birthday party. One went from 5 to 8. One went from 6 to 7. We can do this. Except none of our kids really have a concept of time and all of them have extreme FOMO (fear of missing out). I dropped our oldest off at a friend’s house on the way to the birthday party drop-off, so it was just the two youngest in the car as we continued on.

The older of the two asked how long it was going to be until we arrived; I looked down briefly at my phone directions and cheerily replied, “12 minutes.” She let out a long, “Ugggghhh, 12 minutes feels like the longest amount of time.” Her younger brother immediately quipped, “No, 100 is the biggest number.” And then he quickly corrected himself. “It feels like 15,168 minutes would be the most.”

They eventually calmed down and it took exactly 12 minutes, but as we arrived at the Great Wolf Lodge our son started to cry. He remembered how much fun we had when we were there about six months ago, and he was incredibly jealous of his sister. For two minutes he demanded to stay in the car while I went in with her, only relenting when I mentioned that I could get arrested for that (I’m not sure if it’s true, but it is true enough for now). I was mostly nervous about how my daughter (who turns 8 soon) would handle a three-hour drop-off party, but she confidently went right to her friends and shouted, “bye, dad!” I felt good about her emerging independence.

My son and I got back in the car, and I reminded him that he was about to do something fun, too. “She should never get to go to Great Wolf Lodge by herself ever again,” he said. We raced home, got his costume on and headed to meet his older sister at the trunk-or-treat event at her school (a brief description: It’s like trick-or-treating, but volunteers decorate their cars and hand out candy in the parking lot).

Our oldest spent most of the time running around with friends in her ridiculously amazing alien abduction costume that I spent way too much time finding for her. She would find my son and I in the line occasionally or text me from her watch to check in and then keep finding new friends. I let go a little more, reminding myself that sometimes it feels like she’s 10 going on 15. But then all her friends got picked up at once and my son and I were in the candy line. I had four missed calls from her, probably in the span of a minute, before she got ahold of me and found us. “I didn’t know where you were!” she said, a little shaken.

Ten minutes later we were home. Two minutes later a parent called from the birthday party. Our other daughter was wondering if we could pick her up a little early because she missed us. I dashed to get her, thinking about the push-pull between our kids’ emerging independence and their security knowing they still have a safe place to retreat. I imagine this is what a lot of the next 10 to 20 years of parenting will feel like.

I picked her up and gave her a hug. She told me that she had fun but that she was just ready to be done. “I’m not in charge of the party, but I am in charge of my body. And I can come home,” she told me. She asked to see pictures from the trunk-or-treat event, which included a video I took of a party bus that was there. She started to cry because she was sad she had missed it, just as her brother had been sad to miss the water park. She said she would have had more fun at trunk-or-treat. I reminded her of all the fun things she had told me about from the birthday party already. I handed her a pack of candy marshmallows that her sister had saved for her from trunk-or-treat.

“You can’t worry about the things you missed,” I told her. “The only experience you know is the one you had, and that one seemed pretty good.

“How long will it be until the sun burns out?” our 7-year-old asked me yesterday. I told her I think it will be about 5 billion years (which is more or less true. I was paying attention in college astronomy!), and then our 4-year-old, who never misses a chance to talk about death, asked if he will still be alive when that happens.

I informed him that, no, unfortunately, everyone alive now will be dead in 5 billion years. Our 10-year-old then calculated that there will be about 250 million generations between now and then, which sort of put things in perspective.

It’s weird to think about a time when we’ll be dead, but think about how Earth existed for billions of years before we were born, I said to the kids. And it’s even stranger to think about everything that had to happen for there to even be life on this planet. Everything is an accident or an opportunity, I said. If not for very specific conditions over billions of years, none of this would be happening, and if not for the miracle of moments none of the four of us in the car would be alive.’

Being alive is extremely lucky, I concluded triumphantly.

“And being dead is very unlucky,” our 4-year-old added.

Thankfully, our kids talk about birthdays far more than death.

It seems like once a day that our 4-year-old confirms the order of birthdays at this moment: mine is next, then our middle child in a few weeks, then his right after Christmas, then our oldest and my wife share a birthday in March, and then our pug, Ollie, right after that.

He is suddenly convinced that we are going to Great Wolf Lodge for his birthday, which is news to me. Our almost 8-year-old has been promised a sleepover birthday this year, and no fewer than five times she has written out an evolving (and expanding) guest list. It remains to be seen whether any of them actually are ready for a sleepover, but I’m not going to tell her that right now. Our oldest casually mentioned after trunk-or-treat that renting the party bus and taking it to the movies might be fun for her birthday. Is she actually 10 going on 21?

I went to London a few weeks ago, which wasn’t officially a birthday present but sure felt like one. I was only there for three days, with the Vikings’ win over the Jets (their most recent one, as it turns out) as the centerpiece but with so much more along the way. As part of a part-work, part-fun trip, I wrote a piece for the Star Tribune that is more of a travel philosophy than anything. That, too, was just published if you would like to read it.

The flight was more than 4,000 miles across six time zones, and while up in the sky I became someone half my age. With that much time and nowhere else to go, I finished a project I had been putting off for years: I finally re-read the novel I wrote in my early 20s. It is excruciating to read your own work, especially something that you ostensibly wrote but that you didn’t write. There were threads of good ideas. There were things I didn’t remember writing and things I never forgot. I would do a lot of things differently if I wrote it now, but I was genuinely surprised by how much my thought process then and now is very much the same.

There’s enough there that I will publish it, with a good number of subtractions but no real additions, on this site around the end of the year.

The weather is pants. I scrambled to write that down the other day. I’ve learned that I have to write down little notes quickly so I don’t forget in 14 seconds when the next question is asked of me and I move on to the next thing.

Our oldest asks me every morning what the temperature is outside, often when she is mere steps away from sticking her head out the door to find out herself. Instead of sarcastically saying that, though, I always dutifully check my weather app and report back with the current temperature and the expected high temperature for the day.

It has stayed warmer far longer than usual in Minnesota this fall, though warmer is becoming the new normal. I’ve learned, too, that my daughter doesn’t really care about the numbers. She just wants to know if she can wear shorts and if she needs a sweatshirt at school that day.

It’s colder than yesterday, I tell her, and there might not be that many days left to wear shorts. Sometimes there’s even snow on my birthday, but probably not this year.

“The weather is pants,” she calls back downstairs.

I know for a fact that it’s become one of those quirky phrases that gets repeated around the house as long as the kids are here.

Even as they get older. Even as I do, too.