Today was Captain Science’s 10th birthday. I’m a little less emotional this year than I was on his last birthday, I think because 9 really felt like the “halfway to adulthood” point and that was a lot harder than the “double digits” thing. Still, it feels like each birthday comes faster. Each year passes a little more quickly than the previous year. Captain Science felt like a baby forever; Tank was a baby for a middling time; Babypie’s infancy was over in a breath. Now all three of them seem to get older exponentially, not in a proper one-year-at-a-time fashion.
They’re born, these tiny little creatures, and then you blink and boom, they’re sitting, crawling, walking, talking.
Blink. Toddlers.
Blink. School age.
Blink. Puberty is right around the corner.
I’m afraid to blink, because before I know it, they’ll be grown and gone.
Every blink is a tremendous leap of faith that you’re not screwing it up horribly. It’s a prayer that you and your child make it through to that next blink mostly intact, mostly sane, mostly happy, mostly moving forward. Parenting can seem like one of the poorest investment portfolios, because, if we do it right, we aren’t the ones who see the “return.” We don’t see the outcome, at least not long-term. I know that’s how it should be, but 18 years seems too short a time to adequately prepare your children for another 50, 60, 70+ more years of life. I think, as a parent, you wish you could see ahead to the end, make sure you’re doing the right things so that it will all turn out ok for your kids. Maybe if you knew what they’d come up against, you could better prepare them to face it. You do the best you can with what you’ve got, but you never really know if it’s good enough.
Am I really preparing Captain Science to be ready to face the world more or less on his own in only 7 or 8 more years? Am I teaching him enough? Instilling the right habits? Modeling the right kinds of friendships and other relationships? Loving him fiercely enough? He’s suddenly closer to being a man than he is to being that tiny baby I brought home 10 years ago.
How can any parent really be up to that task? How can we make them ready for adulthood? How can we make ourselves ready for their adulthoods? I guess we can’t–not really. We just have to try our damnedest to get them through one blink at a time.
