I spent the holiday weekend visiting family, and a central part of the experience was spending time with my 4 month old nephew.
To hold a newborn as a parent of adolescents is to open a firehose onto your limbic system. The memories can overwhelm and leave you in a state of emotional diarrhea.
My first morning back, I woke up for an early morning hike to find my mom holding my nephew (she's graciously been taking the early morning shift so the sleep-deprived parents can catch up on sleep after dawn).
The smiling little wriggler with military-length peach fuzz in the front and an endearing mullet in the back was utterly charming. The doe eyes and long lashes resembled the large portrait of our son at that age hanging on the opposite wall.
I enjoy my time with little kids for the most part, but those years were hard - we were a young and hungry couple, working like crazy to save up a downpayment for a house and front-load our nest egg. We were tired all the time. We took the newborn in shifts, which meant even when neither of us worked in the ED, we remained sleep-deprived.
At one point, we joked that but for a few intervals for photos, we could have picked our kids up at age 15 months and been fine skipping that newborn phase to get to the toddler phase, where they interact and the fun really begins.
It was also a delight to visit with my cousins, who reside in my hometown and are more like sisters from our years together in high school and college. An even greater treat was the collection all but one of their college age kids who were visiting home this particular weekend.
One the one hand, the newborn was my past as a father. On the other, the fresh college kids and new grads represented my future as a parent.
And here I sit, in the middle of those two extremes of parenting with a shrinking window of time with the kids under our roof and far nearer to the latter than the former.
I think often about the fantastic graphic representations in this post on the cult blog Wait, But Why. In it, the writer illustrates that for most people, 93% of the days in your entire life that you will spend with your parents are already behind you by the end of your 18th year.
That's startling, but a close approximation to the truth. It informs a lot of my decision-making when it comes to establishing work-life balance, availability for kids' activities, and even how often I say yes to things I might not otherwise choose if my son or daughter ask me to do it.
Just before we left for the weekend, we received the news that a father my age in our community had died after a life-changing diagnosis leading to a long and, at the end, a painful decline. We've know the family for years, and our kids are in school together.
Memento mori is latin for, "Remember you will die." It sounds morbid, but it helps orient my internal compass along the axis of those forces that most deserve consideration in directing my actions.