Some mornings as a parent you wake up and notice that your children are gone.
Physically they’re still present in the house, but they aren’t the children you had last week or maybe even the ones you tucked in the night before. You look at them playing across the room, lying in their beds, or sitting at the kitchen table—and they’re different than the last time you really looked. You notice how quickly they’re changing and it steals the breath from you. As much as it gives you joy, a bit of you quietly grieves as you realize that smaller, younger version of them is gone forever. As much as you treasure the children you have, you miss the other ones who you know you can’t get back. The bittersweetness is staggering.
This week I was away at the beach on a writing retreat. Every couple of months I take a few days to find some solitude and silence and to get a good chunk of work done. With the noise that comes with two children and everything surrounding that, it’s usually a very welcome quiet, but this time I was restless. I started looking at photos of my family and a few minutes later I texted my wife, Jen, to see if she could manage to free up some work space and get the kids together and meet me there at the beach for a spontaneous vacation the following night. It took some calls to hotels, a bit of back and forth with dog sitters, and some frantic packing for her—but 24 hours later we were all together there on the shoreline, getting battered by the waves and tumbling into the sand. It was perfect.
Whenever my mind began to drift with all the things I though I needed to be doing, when all the obligations and responsibilities and the manufactured urgencies started to interrupt—I kept repeating to myself, “Say ‘no’ to them. Say ‘yes’ to your family. They deserve your yes.”
I don’t do resting well. I can always justify writing more, planning more meetings, emailing more people, working a bit longer, crafting another Tweet. I can usually find something that feels pressing that I can convince myself needs to be done right away. And every time I do that, my family gets my no.
The three days we spent together at the beach this week was the pressing thing that needed to be done. It was the greatest use of those precious, fleeting hours. I could have said yes to so many things, most of them every good things—and none of them would have been the best yes. None of those really good things would have been worth sacrificing these moments of full availability to the people who love me well in this life. Those good things would have robbed me of the memories we made together in the sand on the shoreline. It wouldn’t have been a fair trade-off.
It’s easy for us to say no to the most important people in our lives, especially if they love us well and give us freedom to be who we are. It’s tempting to take advantage of this generosity, and to begin saving all our yes’s for other people and other tasks and other requests. After a while we can make saying no our default reply to those close to us—and missing them.
I know I’m going to look at my children again very soon, and once again have my breath taken from me when I realize a younger version of them is gone. I know I’ll again regret not having spent more time with those children, not saying no to more things and yes to them.
But this week I got it right. This week I said some really good no’s so that I could say my very best yes.
Fiercely guard your yes’s, friends. They are worth more than gold. Make sure they are spent on something or someone worthy.
