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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, even though Zelda is my favorite video game series of all time, I never owned a Nintendo of any kind until I was 24, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned from a conversation with my son.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
Like many of you, I had a pretty busy weekend. My Saturday started with my son and I attending men’s Bible study at church, and then I had to set up the drum kit for Sunday’s church service. While we were doing those things, my wife and daughter did a bit of shopping. We all met back at our house shortly before lunch and then headed out together to deliver some flowers to my grandma for Mother’s Day.
Once we finished our visit to my grandma we had time to grab a quick lunch before heading off to my high school reunion. Addison had really enjoyed her one-on-one time with Kari earlier that day, and wanted to have a lunch with just the two of them. Colby liked the idea of just having a lunch with me, so we agreed to split back up for lunch.
While Colby and I were alone in my car he said, “Dad, I thought that when you quit your job you were going to get to spend more time with us.” It was a beautiful sunny day so I had the sunroof open and the windows down. While having the windows down and the sunroof open make a great way to get some sun while I’m in my car, the amount of wind noise that is brought into the car make it difficult to have a real conversation. I closed the sunroof, rolled up the windows, turned the A/C on, and turned the radio off.
To me, when Colby said this to me, he was basically telling me that he’s disappointed in the the amount of time and attention that I’m spending with him. Now, as I mentioned in episode 36, I’m very aware that I have not been spending as much time with my family as I had hoped I would be when I started working from home. But now that my son is calling me out on it, I needed to let him know that I was aware of it and I was making steps to get better.
I started by telling Colby about how I was trying to grow my business to include more clients and that my efforts to add more clients were paying off. I told him about some of the new people that I had recently started helping and how each new client was actually getting me closer to a point where I was going to be able to spend more time with them.
As best as I could, I tried explaining to him that starting a business takes a lot of time to develop and get to a point where it can actually sustain itself and provide for our family. I also shared with him that it takes a lot of extra work when I first add a new client, and that extra work would go away once each client was up and running. The good news was that I’d picked up several new clients over the last month, but the bad news was that it was overloading me a bit with all the extra work.
He seemed to be understanding most of what I was explaining.
I also told him that I was in the process of changing much of my work so that I would get to a point where I only worked during normal work hours and stopped working so many 12 hour plus days, but it was going to be a bit longer before I would be able to reach that goal.
I then told him that I was glad that he told me that he thought we would spend more time together and that I wanted to spend more time with him too. I reminded him that I had taken them on several bike rides recently and that we’d done some activities on some Saturday’s. He was happy to know that I had done those things just so we could be together.
I then confessed to him that I am a workaholic and that I have a long list of ideas and projects that I want to accomplish. I told him that I’m making an effort to put some of those things aside from time to time and spend more time with them. He thought it was cool that I had a list of ideas to work on and it also helped him better understand why I’m always in my studio working.
After all of that explaining I asked him if he understood. He said that he did and he was quiet for a moment. He then said, “I just thought when you started working from home that we’d get to play video games together everyday.”
Here’s what I learned.
My son was looking for a MUCH simpler answer that the one I gave him. When he asked me the question, he had no idea I would respond with such a detailed answer. He didn’t mind the answer I gave him, but it was really more info than he needed. However, his question, and my response revealed something about each of us.
For him, it revealed that he had a very unrealistic view of what life would be like when I started working from home. Somehow he thought that since I was at home that we could just play video games whenever we wanted. Maybe some day. That would be pretty fantastic.
It also revealed that I had not done a good enough job explaining to him what working from home would be like. In fact, I don’t think I explained what it would be like to either of our kids. I guess I assumed that they would know what it meant.
Even if I had given them more detail about what working from home would be like, the truth is, that this last year has been different than any of us expected.
Now here’s the good news. After all of this conversation he told me that he was glad that we had been able to spend the entire morning together. He said that we didn’t always have to do something fun or exciting and that just hanging out with me was worthwhile to him. That’s a reminder that all of us that are parents need to hear.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday, I would be grateful if you’d leave a review in iTunes.
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