“Daddy, I feel like I’m blind, and I literally feel dizzy. I feel like I don’t know where I am, and I feel like it’s Wednesday instead of Thursday.”
This rapid-fire opus of human struggle came droning from my 7-year-old daughter, Zayley, as she advanced toward me in our living room Thursday morning with a zombie-like stagger — her eyes squinted and her hair bearing a “freshly slept on” look. Per her usual, Zayley’s list of “ailments” aimed to bury the lead. It was indeed Thursday…the first day of school.
After dispensing with this valiant attempt to play hooky, I sent her, a second-grader, and Julia, the eldest child much more excited about starting the fourth grade, to eat their breakfast. Soon, the two girls were deeply engaged in a debate on whether the singer Adele is English or British. The verdict: when she sings, she’s English, but the rest of the time, she’s “just a Brit.”
As I started out the door to work, my wife brought our toddler daughter Pfeiffer to her high chair for the morning Cheerio toss (there’s also an evening Cheerio toss), and I teased Julia because I know who the “cursed child” is in the new Harry Potter play, and I refuse to tell her before she reads it for herself.
“You have insider information!” she said, shaking her fist at me as I closed the door.
It was all a funny and refreshing start to my day, and hopefully to theirs, too. And if I hadn’t been running 10 minutes behind schedule, I’d have missed the experience entirely.
For two years, since my wife and I married, I have served as the older two girls’ director for morning operations on weekdays. At first, that entailed waking them up, pouring their cereal, packing lunches, occasionally playing referee and always enduring the competition for how many times they could say, “Hey Daddy…” before I got my first sip of coffee.
The first year, I hated it because it shot to pieces my long cultivated morning routine of vegetating in front of the TV, drinking coffee and then moving on to other things. Last year, I was used to it, plus the job had become more supervisory since they were doing many of the tasks themselves. But I still grumbled. Looking back, I regret I ever felt that way.
Call it the price of progress — and there has certainly been plenty of that — but things have changed. A job that requires me to leave the house before 6 a.m. precludes my participation in family morning operations. Also, the big girls’ continued march toward self-maintenance is increasingly precluding my necessity, although I’m sure my wife could use a little more help wrangling Pfeiffer.
This, for me, is at once happy and sad. It’s great my wife, who is a teacher, and I both have careers we love. It’s great the kids are growing more mature. But each passing day is one that is gone, never to return. As I get older, that fact becomes harder to dismiss.
There’s a saying about not ignoring the little things because one day you’ll realize they were actually the big ones. Put more simply: You don’t know what you have till it’s gone.
Today, I’m no longer the director for morning operations. Next, the girls will be teenagers who think I’m the dumbest person in the world. Before I know it, my wife and I will live in an empty nest talking to our children primarily by phone. As we go, though, all I can hope is that we fully realize the blessing these children truly are and the value of the moments they help create.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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