I don’t get to hang out with my dad enough.
He spends half his time in California for work, and so the hours we’ve spent together these past few years have amounted to a quick dinner here or an afternoon together there in between trips.
I’m getting older, and more and more I’m realizing that I miss the time we used to spend together, just the two of us, doing stuff that we only do with each other: taking cheese tasting classes. Riding motorcycles. Scuba diving.
Talking.
Whatever.
When you’re an adult, and especially when you’re a parent with all the responsibilities that come along with the care of young lives, it’s hard to make time for…well, anyone, honestly. And especially hard to make time for your parents, mostly because they tend to be pretty understanding of all that other stuff you have to do. And so you put off time with them for later. When the kids are older, maybe.
But we’re all getting older.
Not maybe; for certain.
I’m moving across the country. And now I’m a parent, and I understand how that feels to my own parents:
You want your children to do what’s best for them, to do what they have to do, to build their own lives and have their own families and their own experiences and their own adventures, but still, there’s a voice inside of you:
Stay just as you are.
Stay here.
Stay with me.
Dad and I used to travel alone together a lot when I was a kid – we drove to Canada together to buy my first car from my aunt, we drove across the country together after I graduated from college, we went on diving trips, just the two of us swimming through dark water with tanks and flashlights and maybe a parrotfish or two. But we haven’t done this in…I don’t know…a decade, maybe?
Our relationship hasn’t always been easy, but it has always been big. Too big to let fall to the side, even if holding on is harder.
And so, for his birthday, we booked a trip: four days of scuba diving, just us two.
I don’t want to be away from my kids and I’m nervous about how much I’m going to miss them (which feels, right now, like too much), but this matters to him, and so it matters to me. It’s so easy to let relationships that aren’t right there in your face get deprioritized in the noise and madness of raising a young family, but it’s just the truth: Our time with the people we love is finite. And it’s worth making the effort, doing whatever we have to do to make sure the days don’t just slip by until they’re gone.
So today, off to Florida we go. To scuba dive. To eat stuff. To talk. And mostly just to swim together in the quiet, with nothing but the sound of our breathing to keep us company.
