Vol. 109 - What a Difference a Year Makes

On daddy's little helpers

No No. Hey, because I’m not going back inside. We’re gonna be home in five minutes. Hey guys. Guys! Mom is coming home in a couple of hours, we’re together for a little bit longer, okay? keep your shit together and work with me! You should have remembered to bring your cars, okay. It’s in the house and I’m not gonna go back. Are you buckled? Buckle up! Hey buddy, check your fucking attitude.

That was a text I sent to my wife one year ago this weekend.

Well, it was a voice-to-text of me yelling at my kids to get in their goddamn car seats so we could go to a playground or some shit and burn off some energy before Emily got home from a long weekend away. I didn’t realize at the time the voice-to-text function was capturing me admonishing my kids until it was too late. Of course, reading it made me laugh (and realize that I need to stop cursing so much) and of course I immediately sent it to Emily, who, at the time, was en route home from a four-day relay race way out in the North Carolina mountains with a twelve-person team full of our neighbors.

Emily has been a runner all her life. She’s ran several marathons, and countless halfs, ten-, and five-k races, and fun runs. And for almost all of those, she would train to some degree. Sometimes, for the shorter races, the training would be minimal, little more than her normal routine. Other times, for marathons and such, she’d undertake entire plans, blocks of training scheduled to the day, to prepare her for a certain race.

And while I love my wife all the time, I like her a lot more when she’s actively training or something. She’s more herself. More the person that I fell in love with some fifteen years ago.

But, like it does with everything else in life, having kids fucked all that up, and Emily spent several years not running nearly as much as she should (ahem, every day) and not signing up for the races she was always quick to sign up for.

Now that our kids are six and three, Emily and I are slowly coming back to being what I call “whole-ass functioning adults.” That is, grown people who are allowed to pursue our own interests a bit rather than focus fully on the health and wellbeing of our kids. I’m playing a bit of music again and taking longer bike rides than I have in years. Emily is running regularly and signing up for races up and down the Eastern seaboard.

So, obviously I said “Absolutely” when Emily asked if she could do the relay race again this year, leaving me alone with the kids from Thursday to Sunday.

Because (unselfishly) running makes her happy, especially when she’s part of a team. And because (selfishly) I like her a lot better when she’s training for something.

When I sent my curse-laden voice-to-text, it had been the longest stretch I’d ever gone as a single dad of two kids. And it was an absolute disaster. I don’t remember exactly what happened but I do remember that the wheels fell completely off, the plane crashed into the mountain, and everything was engulfed in flames.

I’ve been alone with the kids for long stretches in the year since that race. But, given the disaster that was last year’s long weekend, I was expectedly nervous about things to come.

And then the craziest thing happened: my kids were amazing. They were kind and thoughtful with and toward each other. They were super helpful around the house. They listened the first time (most of the time) and got ready for school in the morning and bed at night with nary an issue. It’s almost like, knowing I was outnumbered, they could either make my life harder or easier, chose the latter.

It’s amazing to watch your kids grow. Whether physically, mentally, or emotionally, witnessing the transitions through their ages is one of my favorite parts of parenthood.

But often, it’s difficult to notice, as growth happens incrementally. It’s when you have a benchmark, a new height ticked onto the wall, a new passage read aloud in a book, or, in my case, a single-parent weekend relatively free of incident, that you realize how fast they grow up, whether you want them to or not.

All that said, the weekend wasn’t entirely without issue. Just to keep me on my toes and perhaps to remind me who is actually in charge, our potty-training daughter took a man-sized dump on the floor at one point. Luckily, my voice-to-text wasn’t activated as I cleaned it up.