After 2 decades of parenting, I’ve learned the days – and years – are short

Standing at the stove, I pause for the hourly recital. In our new apartment in Manhattan, with the weather warm and the windows open, the sound of bells from the Presbyterian church on Amsterdam Avenue floats in at the beginning of each hour. I listen to the 16-note sequence of the Westminster Quarters, that ubiquitous melody believed to be drawn from Handel’s “Messiah,” followed by a series of chimes counting the hour.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Six o’clock.

I usually peel away from my home office computer around 5:30 p.m. and aim to have dinner on the table by 6:30. Tonight, it’s spaghetti and meatballs with a side of sautéed kale.

When I hear the bells, though, I remember that my wife, Lauren, is out for the evening for a work event. And our two high school-age daughters will be home late from school and sports practice. Exactly when, I don’t know – 7? 8?

Too hungry to wait, I make myself a plate, put the lid back on the meatballs, and sit down at the table to eat, alone.

So, this is it, my new reality – quiet, solo dinners?

And also: my new reality – quiet, solo dinners!

The solitude I’d longed for since the earliest days of having children, almost 20 years ago, is here. I can still easily tap into the sense memory of survival-mode parenting – my constant overwhelm and feeling that it would be enough just to get through the day. I remember pushing a double stroller around our neighborhood and looking at other people with envy as they went about their business, unhindered by wriggling children. I wasn’t wishing my life away exactly, yet I longed for their autonomy.

“No man is an island, entire of itself,” the English poet John Donne famously wrote. Yet frequently as a parent I’d yearned for an escape, a break from the exhausting drumbeat of cooking, cajoling, and caregiving.

Now, with my oldest daughter in college and the middle one less than a year away, my solitary meal is more than a preview. I need to adjust to the new phase of life I am entering.

Our family’s silver lining from the pandemic was a permanent shift to remote work and the introduction of nightly family dinners. After a career working odd hours in a broadcast newsroom on West 57th Street in Manhattan, including years of overnights writing for “CBS Mornings,” for the first time I was able to sit with my wife and kids every evening and hear about the swirl of their days while the experiences were still fresh.

Now, with one daughter out of the house, gathering all five of us at the dinner table is a rarity. On many weeknights, even four is tough to assemble.

In Ernest Hemingway’s novel “The Sun Also Rises,” the character Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he says. “Gradually, then suddenly.” That sense of time feels so resonant to me as the parent of three teenagers. I have arrived at the “suddenly” part of parenting, and the final years of their childhood are zipping by.

As I finish my dinner and turn my attention back to work, the Westminster Quarters plays again, followed by the hourly count.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Seven o’clock.

Another 60 minutes gone. That aural reminder punctuates my days now, and frequently startles me. Did the Presbyterians speed up the clocks?

We are renters in an expensive city, and we felt fortunate to land our previous apartment, which had a Riverside Drive address. There, the tempo of my days stretched into a longer, slower cycle. Our apartment faced west, with a sweeping view of the Hudson River, and the sunsets were often riots of color. The rooms facing the river would glow orange with the late-day sun. Sometimes we would turn off the lights to heighten the effect.

When we moved in, I promised myself I would never take that view for granted. And indeed, looking out at the panorama every day reminded me to live in gratitude in other aspects of my life, too.

At the same time, my daughters were entering a more independent phase, and I noticed I was experiencing something new as a parent: the desire to freeze time. My kids had hit the exact right age. They were funny, smart, insightful. I really enjoyed their company and our conversations. I was “in the flow” of parenting, maybe for the first time.

As I look back at that time when sunsets organized my days, it’s hard not to see that the sun was setting on a phase of my parenting life. We also spent our last spring in that apartment watching a pair of mating red-tailed hawks and their treetop nest, as they protected their hatchlings and eventually abandoned the nest when the young birds became independent.

I recently found a tattered yellow sticky note in my wallet. A column of numbers reads, 3:28, 3:32, 3:35 ... The numerical series goes on until 4:44, when it becomes torn and illegible. I was keeping track of Lauren’s contractions on April 7, 2007. Our daughter Tessa was born hours later.

The same sticky note contains a to-do list, evidence of my mundane preoccupations the day before my second daughter came into the world: “paint, ants, ceiling, computer.” Looking back, I find it hard to summon any feeling of urgency around those items, though I do know Lauren’s water breaking that day interrupted me while I was painting the kitchen white, and once Tessa was born, I never did find the time to finish. The strip of blue paint above the cabinets remained almost until we moved out 15 years later.

I look up from the computer as Tessa and Olive push through the front door into the apartment and drop their backpacks. Ravenous, Tessa goes straight to the stove, makes herself a plate, and joins me at the table. As she scarfs down meatballs, she animatedly tells me about her basketball practice. I push my computer aside to focus on what I know is a fleeting moment.

To modify that well-worn description of parenting: The days are short, and the years are short.

Eight o’clock.

As Donne concludes in “No Man is an Island,” “And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The church bells I hear every hour now remind me of what I’m leaving behind – the feeling of constant, exhausting, overwhelming responsibility. This new phase of parenting has the slower, calmer cadence I once coveted. Which reminds me of another line, this one from “Aesop’s Fables”: Be careful what you wish for.