Since my wife and I have become empty
nesters, we have on more than one occasion silently looked at one another and
mumbled something about, ‘what do you want to do?’ before shrugging our
shoulders simultaneously and mumbling, ‘I dunno, what do you want to do?’ I am
sure it is not because we are boring or even worse, bored with each other. I
think it has more to do with the fact that the maelstroms, otherwise known as
the children who encompassed our day to day lives for 20 odd years, are all grown
up and moved away. I mean, after playing
in what seemed like a Stanley Cup final every day, it's a little hard to get
excited about a game of shinny.
There is a certain elation when the last
child finally leaves home and suddenly the options are there lying before you.
I have written before of the plans to convert bedrooms into offices or studios
or concert halls. But after that period
of elation and construction, comes the day to day living of pretty uneventful
lives. There are no real challenges now
with work, neither of us are changing professions; please refer to the idiom,
old dogs/new tricks. Retirement is not really on the table as that would just
give us more time to shrug our shoulders at one another and ask each other what
we wanted to do.
There are fleeting thoughts of shaking
things up a bit, but I certainly won’t present my wife with a radical new look
or lifestyle. If I did, she would probably laugh herself into an early grave.
The middle aged crazies have already been there and gone and fortunately, I did
not buy the T shirt. I have focused a
bit more on physical health; I have taken up running, but of course all this
does is provide me more of an opportunity to hurt myself. Running on icy roads
in the dark with eye sight that seems to fade on a daily basis is certainly a
recipe for all sorts of new pain. I am sure I will try to elicit some level of
sympathy from my wife, but I think we all know what that will get me.
We are certainly welcoming our time
together, as most couples do. Over the years as children enter your family,
there is less attention paid to one another as the focus of your life becomes
your children. You work hard at raising them with the proper values, the proper
outlook on life and respect for other people. There is no manual, there are no
guidelines, just your own values that you try and instill in them and hopefully
a few of those values stick and they turn out well enough that visits to the
big house are not in order.
My son and his wife have recently taken
this step on their own and welcomed a baby girl into our family. I can often see the questions in their eyes
as the reality hits of just how massive their responsibility is. This tiny
human being relies on them for 100% of her needs; 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week, 365 days a year, and one more on a leap year and will for many, many
years to come. It is certainly not something that should be taken lightly and
sanity is sometimes sorely tested. Perhaps that is why I’ve written so much
about Thing One, Thing Two and Thing Three. It was my method to maintain some
level of sanity which I am told by some, wasn’t a very successful method.
A few days ago I was trying to organize our
collection of videos that had been burned onto DVD’s. With my perfect memory, I
figured I would be able to remember what shows were burned to what disc without
that frivolous little thing called labeling.
I forgot I didn’t have a perfect memory anymore.
As the stack of DVD’s reached the critical
out-of-control stage, it suddenly dawned on my wife that this was one thing
that could be done with my time, instead of thrashing around on dark icy
streets. So with her encouragement I started to pop the discs in the player to
decide whether or not they were worthy of labeling or tossing into the trash.
That was how we came across a disc of
videos of our kids when they were very young. I had, many years ago,
transferred most of the video tapes into electronic format and stored them on
disc to sit unlabeled and forgotten. We were
transfixed for almost an hour just watching their antics, hearing their wild
giggles and screams and seeing their young faces absolutely loving every second
of their lives. It was difficult to stop
watching.
I was told so many times in the past by people
older than me, that life races by and before you know it, there are a multitude
of life events that happened years ago that felt like they just happened
yesterday. I just wanted to say to all
the young parents out there, that those sentiments are true. It really did seem
like yesterday. Years ago in these very
pages I quoted from a song by Steve Miller, “Time, keeps on slippin’ into the
future”. Yes it does Steve, but now it also seems to keep slippin' into the
past.
