Katy Haynes reflects on enjoying her time parenting her young son.
I saw something online recently that stopped me in my tracks. It was a simple graph showing parent-child in-person time over a lifetime, plotted against the child’s age. According to it, more than 40 percent of your total parenting time has already passed by the time your kid starts kindergarten.
By middle school, two-thirds is gone. I saved the picture on my phone and looked at it every day that week. My son is five and in kindergarten. How could nearly half our time together already be behind us? My world feels like it’s contracting and expanding at the same time. It’s small: wake up, get the kids off to school and daycare, work, pickup kids, dinner, bedtime. Repeat.
But it’s also enormous: A fascination with bears led us to discover Wedge, the biggest grizzly in Alaska. A months-long obsession with “the tube” — what my son calls the esophagus — taught me more than I ever wanted to know about digestion. And during one of our endless talks about death, I mentioned reincarnation. He thought for a moment and said, “I want to come back as a book, so people can read me.”
My days are tightly bound but filled with the texture and color of being in his world. Right now, I’m living inside that graph, the bar where the in-person hours are still high. Sometimes I want to step outside it, to have my evenings back, free from Memory Game marathons and bedtime negotiations.