Lucky Dad No. 25: And Suddenly, It's Over

I don’t agree with the cliche that your years of raising children go by fast. There were twenty-three years between Katie’s birth and Claire’s departure for college, and that’s a long stretch. If you had stopped us at any point in the middle of those years and asked us if they were going by fast, you would have received an incredulous, “What are you talking about?” look. For the first seven or eight years, I don’t think Francine got one full night’s sleep. Try that, and tell me whether it goes by fast.

To be fair, the cliche isn’t really false, it’s just poorly phrased. Time is elastic. A period in our lives when we are working the hardest might feel, at the time, like an exhausting, endless marathon, and yet in our recollection, that period might seem short and compressed. The years of raising our girls didn’t go by fast, not at all, but they were crowded.

In his song “It’s Something That We Do,” Clint Black describes love as “an endless and a welcome task,” and that’s as good a description of parenthood as you are likely to find. I always wanted to be a father, and I always thought I’d be good at it. At times fatherhood was a burden, but it was a burden I had sought, and one that I willingly accepted. Raising our girls was the central focus of our lives. My career mattered a lot to me, and it has been a great source of personal satisfaction, but the greatest spur to my professional ambitions was my desire to provide for the family.

In the classic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” as James Stewart goes through the worst day of his life, he says to his wife “You call this a happy family? Why do we have to have all these kids?” Francine and I have said that line to each other countless times over the years, when the stresses of parenthood were taking a toll. It was one of our ways of reminding ourselves that we were, in fact, right where we wanted to be.

Sometimes I walk around our house looking at all the photographs of our girls at various points in their lives, and say to myself “Did that really all happen?” It can seem a bit unfair. For eighteen years, you give everything you have to raise your child. If you are lucky, and if you do it right, you have this delightful person living with you. You love her, and she is one of your favorite people in the world. And what happens? She moves away. And as outrageous as that may seem, it’s actually the best outcome you can hope for. You certainly don’t want your adult child living the basement, doing drugs and playing video games.

No, it doesn’t go by fast. But here’s the thing: It ends suddenly. One day, they are right there, as much and as fully a member of the family as ever, and the next day--the very next day--they are gone. When your daughter moves out of the house to begin her adult life, it’s a profound and sudden change. Sure, she’ll be back for vacations, for the summer, maybe for an extended period of transition in her life, but you are no longer raising her as a child.

We spent six and a half crowded years in our first house in St. Paul. The girls were seven, five, and two years old when we moved in, and we made a lot of great memories in that house. We sold the house when we relocated to New Jersey, and when it came time to move out I found it unbearably poignant to walk around the empty house for the last time, visiting each room in turn. At the end, I found myself leaning against the stair post, crying. My family was waiting for me at the door but I literally could not let go. Then Maura came over and said “Don’t be said it’s over, be glad that it happened,” and she took my hand and led me out of the house.

It doesn’t go by fast. That part of the cliche is not right, but the rest of it sure is: You’d better enjoy it while you can.