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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, my three favorite songs about time are Clocks by Coldplay, Our Time is Running Out by Muse, and Yesterday by The Beatles (with Back in Time by Huey Lewis and the News in fourth), and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
Well, if you haven’t figured it out by now, today’s episode is about the passage of time. I think the poem, “Time’s Paces” by Henry Twells, updated by Guy Pentreath expresses my feelings perfectly:
When I was a babe and wept and slept,
Time crept;
When I was a boy and laughed and talked,
Time walked.
Then when the years saw me a man,
Time ran.
But as I older grew,
Time flew.
Soon, as I journey on,
I’ll find time gone.
May Christ have saved my soul, by then,
Amen.
Episode 362 is called Enriched by Education and I wrote that episode in November of 2015. At that time my son Colby was in 6th grade and had just turned 11 the month prior. I mentioned in that episode that two weeks into Kindergarten, Colby’s teacher and principal encouraged us to move him up to first grade and after careful consideration, we did allow him to skip kindergarten and move up to first grade.
His teacher and principal were confident that he had both the academic and social skills necessary to move up. It seemed odd to me at the time that they’d be able to observe enough of a difference in him to make such a recommendation. They said that he was already reading and doing other things that they wouldn’t be getting to until the end of the year. We agreed with their academic assessment, but we worried about the social ramifications. Not only that, but this would mean Colby would always be the youngest, and perhaps smallest kid in his class. How would those impact him as he aged? Would his social maturity hold up?
After he moved up to first grade continued to perform well academically by the way. He was a valedictorian of his class, graduated with a GPA above 4.0, scored a 34 on the ACT, and won a full-tuition scholarship. He’s now 19 and about to start his junior year at the University of Oklahoma. Socially, he’s been great too. Like me, he’s an introvert until he gets to know you, has trouble being the first to engage in conversation, and will hug the walls of a room if he doesn’t know anyone. But once he’s comfortable, his personality opens up and he’s done great at making friends. Being a part of the marching band in high school and college has been a huge part of helping him make friends.
Throughout the entire process of determining whether or not Colby should move up, we really only focused on him and what was best for him. However, a few weeks after we’d made that decision my attention shifted and I had a startling realization. Our decision to let Colby move up meant that we were going to lose an entire year of having Colby in our home. WHOA!
Well, that day was 12 years away, so I pushed that thought aside and moved forward. But every so often, typically at the start or end of a school year, that thought would hit me again. One by one the years went by until suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, Colby was a high school graduate.
You’ve heard me say it recently because it’s been on my mind a lot, but it’s so painfully true when they say the days are long but the years are short. In future episodes I’ll talk more about Colby moving out of our house and I even have a story about college marching band that I have scheduled for the beginning of football season. But for today, I want to stay focused on the idea of time.
Of all the resources we are given, time is the most valuable. We can always make more money, buy more things, go on more vacations, grow our talents, etc, but we can not create more time. Time is a constant, never ending, never slowing treadmill. We’re all placed on it at birth and most of us assume we have more of it left than we do. We assume we have more of it left with those we love than we do.
I tried to find the original research for the statistic to verify its accuracy, but I couldn’t track it down. But several sources say something very similar. That is, that 75% of all the time we will ever spend with our children is complete by the time they reach 12 years old. By the time they turn 18, 90% of our parent-child time together has been spent. This breaks my heart! This means I’ve already spent over 90% of my allotted time with each of my kids! And for Colby, we lost a year of that!
Here’s what I learned.
9,460,800 minutes is the amount of time we get in 18 years. All you fans of Rent know that means we lost 525,600 minutes with Colby. But I’m grateful for every single minute we DID get with him. Yes, there were plenty of long days of messes, disobedience, hard lessons, getting in trouble at school, hospital visits, helping him through heartache, disappointment, the loss of loved ones, sickness, and all the other things that come with life. Some of those were very, very long days.
But here I am as a living testimony that those years were blazingly short. Seriously, where did the time go!?!?
I have tried incredibly hard to be a good father, present and active in the lives of my kids. And to be honest, I think I have been a good dad. Of course, I look back and I see missed opportunities, lessons I didn’t teach him, life skills that got overlooked, things I should have said differently.
I mean, when Colby was very young I was often working late in my home office trying to build my business. He’d come in and tell me goodnight and he’d often ask if he could sit in my lap and fall asleep. I never once told him yes. There was always a reason to say no. In my mind, another day would come that would be better. One day he stopped asking. One day he was a grown man. One day the opportunity to do it was long gone and I never even knew it.
I’ve learned that there will always be stuff we could have done better. No matter how engaged or present we are in our kids lives, there will always be regret. I suppose that’s what grandkids are for? I’m not sure yet.
For those of you with kids in the house, just remember that these days will be gone before you know it. You’ll screw things up and do things you’ll regret and that’s okay. We’re all trying to figure out this parenting thing as we go along. But be present and active in your kid’s lives. Let them fall asleep in your lap. Teach them all the life skills that your parents taught you and the ones you wish they’d taught you.
Let the bad days fade from memory and hold on to the good ones. Be grateful for every second you get with them, and prepare them as best you can for the day they fly from your nest. If we do it right, we’ll create responsible, self-sufficient adults that will look back fondly at the time we had together, raise their kids better than we raised ours, and come back to visit us often. At least that’s what I’m hoping for. In the meantime, I’m cheering them on as they navigate what is often the most challenging stage of life.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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