RUNNING OUT OF TIME
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional roller coaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 64.
Hello, friends. I heard the statistic recently. I don't actually even know where it originated, but the statistic is that by the time your child is 18, you'll have spent 90% of the time that you will ever spend with them.
90%. I looked into this a bit more, and the related statistic is that by the time your child's 12, as a parent, you'll have spent 75% of the time that you'll ever spend with them. So now that my oldest is 18, does that really mean I only get 10% more of him? The worst part is that the first time I heard the statistic, it was on a social media post of a dad who has much younger kids.
His message was that you need to cherish every moment. But of course, in his case, he looked like he had much more of that 90% still ahead of him. My own reaction to the video, what my brain offered me was, I'm too late.
That's not to say that looking back, I didn't try to stay in the moment with my kids. God knows I did. I spent so much time trying to create traditions with my boys.
It's not easy trying to maximize these special moments. Some of us might have worked full-time, which seemed to put pressure on the moments when we were with our kids. But I also remember when I stayed home with my boys full-time when they were little, it was still hard to create special moments every minute because there were errands to run or chores I had to do.
Or frankly, so many hours, it was challenging to fill every moment with something exciting. But truly, I believe as moms, we all do our best. And we've been motivated by the desire to make our kids' faces light up with excitement or wonder.
I always wanted to create a childhood for my kids that was magical and memorable. Let's face it, it made me happy to see my kids happy. Their smiling faces gave me permission to believe that I was doing a good job and that all was well.
So there's two parts to this. I wanted to create joy for my kids in the moment, both for them and for me. But I also had this sense that I was creating joy that would last in my kids' memories.
And from the time my kids were really little, I was focused on capturing those moments in a way that would ensure that they were memorable. I mean, I scrapbooked religiously when the kids were younger. I created these really colorful, detailed scrapbooks with die-cut stickers and borders for every picture.
Eventually, I moved to creating online photo books. And you might think I'm crazy, but I actually ordered extra copies of each of those online albums so that when my kids got married, I'd be able to hand them a copy to remind them of what a fabulous childhood they had. I don't know if that's actually what I was thinking at the time, but there must have been some thought along those lines in the back of my head.
Looking back at their baby and toddler albums, I am reminded of so many precious moments. The scrapbooks are like a little dose of heaven that I get to reflect back on. Now, this is just a personal example of how much we can try to fight the fleeting nature of time by capturing memories.
It's almost like we're trying to hold on to the time. And I don't actually think there's anything wrong with that. I think there's something beautiful about memories being a way for us to reflect back on the beautiful parts of our life.
And if you think about any of the people who you might have lost, the memories of your time with that person are always yours and always available for you to cherish, even when you can't spend time with them anymore. And so I think there's something interesting about this motivation to capture memories, whether for other people or just for ourselves. It's exactly why each of us moms are the first one with a camera at every event, wanting to take hundreds of photos to capture every moment.
On your phone, how many thousands of blurry images do you have of your kids? Images taken from far away at some sporting event or a school ceremony or performance. The image is just terrible, but the sight of it brings back that beautiful memory of being there in the moment. It all feels so fleeting.
Holidays, vacations, performances, graduations. These moments don't happen every day in our life. And for most of us, these moments are the exception rather than the rule in terms of the day-to-day of our lives.
Let's face it, our daily lives are pretty mundane. We're endlessly ticking off to-do lists. We've got errands to run and meetings to attend, helping our kids find the car keys, the backpack, the last-minute trip to the doctor to get the physical signed before school starts.
In terms of time spent, this mundane activity actually occupies the vast majority of most of our lives. It's actually a little sad to think about the truth of that. So it's no wonder that we try so hard to create and hold on to those special moments, particularly with our kids.
A few months ago, I had an interesting and honestly painful interaction with one of my sons. One day he said to me, you know, we never really did anything as a family when I was growing up. Now, there are a few things that strike a knife to the heart more than thinking you're the kind of mom who's tried really hard to create special memories with her kids, who's put so much love and attention into creating these special moments.
I made a huge deal of birthday parties. I went over the top for holidays. I even started an embarrassingly complicated treasure hunt for every day of Advent every year.
Look, I have scrapbooks, at least up to the age of eight or nine, that gives proof of how hard I tried. But let's face it, I also turned on the TV when I needed a break. I let them play hours and hours of Minecraft.
I was bored to tears playing when we were just at home. I also worked. I volunteered.
I was tired on the weekends. It's those memories that come flooding back to mind when my son suggests that we never really did anything. Because my brain answered, he's right.
You didn't do enough. You wasted precious time with your kids as they were growing up. I felt immediate shame and disappointment.
Was there a part of me during all of those hours of scrapbooking where I was trying to preempt my guilt? As if even in those moments when I was trying so hard, I could already see how many hours I wasn't doing something special with my kids. Almost as if that meant I was already failing some test of motherhood. I don't think my son meant his comment as critically as I took it to be.
He was involved in a relationship where he was comparing their family to ours. In that way of teenagers, he was becoming aware that the way he was raised was not the only way. And sometimes that looks like pushing against what they've always known.
It wasn't his words that caused my guilt and shame. It really comes down to this preciousness of the time we have with our kids and how much we care about making it all count. As my boys grow up, I want so much for them to reflect back on their childhood with happiness.
I want for them to remember and always know how much, how completely and unconditionally they are loved. Time is funny. We can feel like we have too much of it and also not enough at the very same time.
It's been a mantra of my life to tell myself I'm so busy, I don't have enough time. And for a really long time, this thought had been an identity for me, an absolute truth of my life. And along with this well-practiced belief that I'm so busy has come a lot of stress and overwhelm.
But we literally have no control over the passage of time. We all get the same 24 hours every day. And here's the bottom line.
We spend all of the time we're given. I imagine if you're listening to this podcast, it's likely you've spent close to or well over 20 years raising a family. 20 years.
If someone told me they'd done something for 20 years without any context, I'd probably think that was a really long time. And back when our kids were babies, 20 years probably did feel like a really long time. So how have you spent the past 20 years? That's 7,300 days, 175,200 hours.
So let's say you sleep on average seven hours a night. So that's roughly 30% of the past 20 years you've been asleep or in bed. 30% of 20 years.
That's the equivalent of 2,129 days. Yikes. That statistic makes me feel a little less sad about how often I wake up in the middle of the night.
Maybe it's my body's way of telling me I'm wasting my time sleeping. But then, of course, when we don't sleep, we spend the next part of the day in a fog. So it feels like more wasted time.
Okay, so we've spent 30% of our life to date sleeping. You have to spend some amount of time in the day eating, getting dressed, taking care of your basic needs. That easily takes up another three hours throughout the rest of the day, give or take, depending on whether or not you're cooking your food or how long it takes you to get ready.
Over the past 20 years, you've invested quite a bit of time in your kids. When they were younger, the time was spent literally caring for their every need. And as they've gotten older, that time has transitioned into shuttling them around to activities and friends' houses, helping them with homework.
Honestly, just worrying about them and trying to set them up to be successful. Once they learn to drive, we can easily replace the time we used to spend driving them with time spent worrying about whether they get to their destination safely. And then, I've noticed this even in myself, you can spend time sitting around waiting for them to have a moment to spend with you.
In terms of how we've spent the past 20 years, I haven't even gotten into the time we've spent at work or volunteering, running errands, just time, endless hours spent in the car, the appointments, the meetings, the responsibilities at home, cleaning, laundry, paying bills. I'm sure I'm leaving some everyday tasks off the list, but even this list is already pretty long. And notice that I haven't even accounted for anything that might count as a precious scrapbook-worthy moment.
In fact, it may even seem a bit depressing to go through your everyday life and account for how you spend your time. Do I really spend 80% maybe even 90% or more of my days sleeping, working, driving, eating, and cleaning? So let's just assume that it's 10% of our time that's not taken up by the mundane everyday tasks of life. How do you spend that time? I think this is often why we tell ourselves to be present when we're in the midst of moments that we really want to cherish and appreciate.
That 10% of our average day or average week, we want so much to make that count. We want to create a bit of joy and happiness during that 10%, but we're often not sure how to do it. Typically, the way we approach creating joy in our life or peace or happiness, whatever that emotion is that you most want to feel, we often try to do things that will bring us these positive feelings.
So maybe that's a vacation or the way we approach holidays. We might plan to do something fun over the weekend, spend time with our kids, a date to go see a girlfriend, go to a yoga class, meditate. All of these things can seem to bring us peace and happiness for a period of time, but then we're right back to living our lives, not in the moment.
I think it's so interesting that we go from spending what feels like 100% of our time physically caring for our young kids, and when they become teens, it can feel like we spend 100% of our time emotionally caring for and really just worrying about our big kids. You can probably relate to this. When you're worried or anxious about something going on with your kids, it becomes all you can think about.
Our minds can get stuck in this endless loop of frantic problem solving. What if I try this? How can I get them to do that? Maybe I'll just remind her again. It can feel overwhelming, this anxiety.
It's easy to think that there's something wrong with us when we become trapped in these panicked loops of worry. Looking back on my own life with my boys, I have truly wasted so much time that I could have been present with them because my mind was racing, looking for solutions, trying to fix whatever it is that I thought was broken. And believe me, I get it, thinking that we're out of control when we can't force ourselves to stop the worst-case scenario thinking.
As I've come to appreciate how my mind works, I now understand how my mind is literally just trying to keep me safe. My subconscious is constantly scanning the environment for danger. From an evolutionary standpoint, this hyper-awareness has served us well.
But we're no longer trying to keep ourselves safe from predators. The danger we so desperately want to avoid is seeing our child hurt and then experiencing our own pain or shame or guilt for having let them down. So we've spent the past 20 years slogging through our daily lives and worrying about our kids.
But when we look back on those 20 years, that 90 percent of the time you will spend with your kids, what do you remember? Well, now that I've brought up the drudgery and I'm realizing just how much of the past 20 years I've spent just checking things off a to-do list or going through the boring tasks of life, I'm feeling guilty that I've somehow done it wrong, that I haven't appreciated the time I had enough. But I'm going to interrupt that thought because honestly, that guilt doesn't serve me. Have I wasted time, precious time with my boys? Yes, I probably have.
Is that the way I want to remember the past 20 years? Absolutely not. Because that 10 percent, that 10 percent of the past 20 years, that 10 percent has been magical. And as I start to focus on those magical times, I remember not only the holidays and the vacations, but I also remember those times in the car when my boys would open up to me.
I remember the hugs, the ones when they were little and the more rare but beautiful hugs I still get today. The number of times I've heard and said the words, I love you. I remember seeing the looks on my kids' faces when they accomplish something, anything.
That look of surprise and triumph. I remember the dinners, just sitting around the table together, the laughter, the moments when we were just together. As I start to open my mind to remembering all of these moments that didn't make it into the scrapbook, my heart feels so full.
It doesn't feel like only 10 percent, it feels like everything. My friend, your emotional experience doesn't come from the time spent, or days on vacation, or hours taking adventures. It comes from your mind.
Our minds create the joy and the happiness and the peace, those emotions we wish were more accessible in our daily lives. So how can we harness our mind's ability to create this? Especially now that we have to transition from a time when our kids needed so much more of our time, and now we find we have hours to ourselves, so much more time to spend. And it can seem daunting to fill those hours, particularly if we're thinking of the loss of the time we've had with our kids.
As they transition to their next chapter, we can find ourselves staring at an empty calendar. The mundane, daily living tasks are still there, but where's that joy? Where's my happy 10 percent? So if it's our minds that create peace, or joy, or happiness, or whatever that beautiful emotion is that you want more often in your life, how can you intentionally create it? First, I invite you to notice how you're thinking about your future. Are you focused on the loss of your children and the empty hours? Is your mind painting a future that looks bleak and disconnected? Whatever negative vision you have for the future, notice the thoughts that are creating that anxiety and feeling of loss for you.
Notice these thoughts and recognize that they're simply sentences in your brain about the future. They're not destined to become true simply because your brain has manufactured them. The only purpose they serve is to create pain of an outcome that hasn't even happened yet.
We can be so afraid to feel the pain of the future that we actually create a situation where we feel pain right now. The second thing I invite you to do is to be intentional about how you're thinking about your past. Are you wishing things were different? Or are you accepting the reality of what has been? Are you focused on the 90% of your time that you might not have lived as joyfully or intentionally as you had wished? Or are you focused on the 10% of the hours that you might have spent creating beautiful memories that have inspired your mind to create 100% of your joy and the love you feel for your children? If you carry regret and guilt from the past, I encourage you to find the compassion for yourself to let it go.
In the same way that we can bring the pain of the future into our present moment by worrying about our future, we bring the pain of the past into the present by carrying with us all of the should-haves and regrets. We think about all of the ways we wish we might have parented differently, as if just changing the past would make the challenges we're facing right now a little easier. The underlying assumption is that it's our fault, that we've failed, that we should have done something differently.
But here's the thing. We have absolutely zero control over the past. We simply cannot change it.
All of the guilt, the shame, regret and resentment, all of this pain, none of it changes a thing about the past. And sometimes the past can be a teacher. We can learn valuable lessons from our mistakes.
But once the lesson is learned, the negative emotion gets us nowhere. We can apologize, we can change course, we can do things differently going forward. But holding on to the pain only serves to bring that pain of the past into our current moment, robbing us of our ability to cherish the time we have right now.
This is life. So when these things happen that we don't want, we can either waste our lives wishing things were different, or we can try to find the perfection in the reality of our experience. It's not always easy.
You sometimes can't just change your mind when you're in pain. But keep in mind that our brains tend to find what we're looking for. If we believe that our lives should have been different, we will find everything that is wrong with our lives.
This tendency of our brain is called confirmation bias. And we do this in so many areas of our lives. But when it comes to our emotional life, we're experts.
If we believe our kids are struggling, we'll find evidence for it. If we think we're not good enough, we'll find plenty of evidence to support that belief. If we think we're losing something precious as our kids leave the nest, that's all we'll see.
There is so much beauty that exists in your life right now if you'd only look for it. We so often shroud ourselves in these cloaks of unhappiness that we don't see the perfection of what is. Sometimes you have to work a little bit for it, because it's our minds that create the pain, but also the joy.
So if you find yourself in pain, know that if your mind is powerful enough to create the pain, it's powerful enough to make room to create joy. Happiness, love, connection, purpose. None of these emotions are created by time.
It's so tempting in this transition to the empty nest as our kids pull away. It's so tempting to believe that we wasted something precious, that we wish we'd cherished this time with our kids a little more. And now that we look ahead, it seems the hours will never be enough.
But in truth, all we ever really have is this moment, right now. As Eckhart Tolle would say, the present matters because everything happens here. Everything you feel and sense takes place in the present moment, right now.
We think about our past, we think about our future, but consider that this moment you have right now is actually more worthy of your focus. Although it may be that the literal amount of time that I might get to spend with my boys may only be 10% of their aggregate number of hours that I will ever spend with them. Although this time is short, the love and the joy I feel for them isn't measured in minutes.
It's also not limited to the number of hours I get to spend with them. These are feelings I get to carry with me always for the rest of my life. This is available to you too.
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
