Don't you just love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies.
Once again, the movie “You've Got Mail” can put words to my feelings.
I really do love autumn and I really do miss buying school supplies. I always enjoyed taking the kids out and watching them pick just the right notebooks and pencil cases. Pencils, pens, and, when they were young enough, crayons. A new lunch box, a backpack, shoes, clothes, and usually more shoes.
The kids are all grown up and moved on now. Even our nieces and nephews are old enough that “School Supply Shopping” (how’s that for some alliteration!) is no longer a thing.
It never ceases to amaze me, the little things that you miss about raising your children. School supplies are just the tip of it. The first day of school (which I took the day off for so we could take them to school together), open house, field day, sports, concerts, plays. You never really appreciate the routine while you have it. It's just, you know, work. Life. Gotta get them to school for this practice or that rehearsal. You are so busy and so rushed that taking the time to actually appreciate the importance, the joy, of being part of their lives in this way doesn’t always happen until you no longer are.
We have a grandson now. He's a little over two years old and he’s wonderful. But your job as a grandparent is different from that of a parent. A parent has to love, yes, but also raise, teach, and set boundaries for their children. Parents have to show their kids how to be a person. A grandparent only has to love, well, love and spoil.
Now, of course, we will support our grandchildren in every way we can. We will go to their open houses, field days, sporting events, concerts, and plays. But it isn’t the same. We are there as grandparents. Our place is to support, not to parent. It has to be that way. The parents need to parent.
We had our time; we raised our children.
With grandchildren you get to relive a lot of the firsts. First steps, first words, and all of the wonderful things that kids do as they grow up. I am fortunate enough now to have a job where I can spend time with my grandson. When my own kids were young I didn’t have that kind of flexibility. Summers especially, I would usually leave for work before they woke up and come home after they went to bed.
You do what you have to do to keep your family fed and housed, but you also tend to miss a lot that only happens for a short time, and then never happens again. I really would love to go back and spend more time with them when they were young. With my sons especially, I missed a lot. They were such amazing little kids. Happy, funny, creative, adventurous, and mischievous.
I got to spend more time with my daughter, her being five years older than the twins. Work wasn’t quite as demanding then. It was in a different field and was a real nine-to-five job. (Okay, seven-to-four, but nobody wrote a song about that...) I can remember getting to spend more time with her as a toddler and an elementary school kid. I remember when she would sit on my lap to play the game Mickey’s A,B,C’s. She loved making Mickey Mouse wander around that house. I remember sharing video games on the SNES, Indian Princesses, and daddy-daughter dances. She was a joy to be around. (Well, she still is, I mean, you know. So are the boys, it’s just very different when they are grown.)
With my boys, I was there when I could. We played video games. I especially remember Super Monkey Ball and SoulCalibur on the GameCube. There were trips to the zoo, the science center, and the Henry Ford museum. (My daughter was of course along on the trips as well.)
Things were different with the boys than with my daughter. Work changed. It was more demanding on my time, as I said before, especially during the summer months. When they were older, though, around nine, I started coaching their soccer team, which I did until they aged out of travel soccer at eighteen.
Between soccer and wrestling there were a lot of evenings and weekends spent with them, and I treasure those times. I really do. Even these, though, come to an end eventually. We got to watch both boys compete in college, one wrestling and the other soccer and e-sports. Then, well, they were grown. Moved out, began their own lives.
There are so many bits of fortune-cookie wisdom that seem insane when you are twenty, silly when you are thirty, not so crazy when you are forty, and damn inconveniently accurate when you are fifty. Probably the most relevant to this conversation would be “nobody ever wished, upon their deathbed, that they had spent more time at work.”
Then, one day, you are left with September making you want to buy school supplies, and you have no one to buy them for.
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