how to trick time

& get years with your kids back

Like all mothers I’m often admonished: “it goes so fast” and whenever I hear that, I feel like I’ve been accidentally let in on another parent’s regret.

I’m lucky to’ve had babies across a decade. I get to marvel at a two-year-old’s hips squeezed by tiny elastic underpants and wave hello/ goodbye to a boy with feet bigger than mine. Time does go fast. The finger-waggers aren’t lying.

I know they’re trying to be helpful. They’re saying: slow it down if you can. Try to recalibrate. The end takes you by surprise and the missteps are many.

They’re telling me to be present and nostalgic simultaneously so I feel every moment as it passes. They’re warning me to keep my heart full and aching with grief and gratitude so I don’t take these days for granted.

This kind of awareness can be achieved, but only in spurts, because family life’s messy and loud and it’s hard to keep thank you thank you in your heart while somebody’s screaming in your ear. Also, preemptive nostalgia is heavy and thick and most of the time you need to move around unencumbered, getting shit done. It’s nearly impossible to hold urgency and self-reflection at once, which is why summer camp is such a great hack.

It works like this: give a little time away and get a lot of time back.

Lake Thun // Ferdinand Hodler

A multi-week absence lets you flirt with the inevitable and get a second shot. One of the hardest things about parenthood is living every phase intensely at once, and then… it’s over. There are no vacations. No tabling the era to review and adjust. Often you don’t even know a phase has passed until it’s well behind you.

“I wish I could live it just one more day” is another warning to love the weeds while you’re in them. Summer camp gives you the perspective you functionally can’t maintain in the onslaught of every day. “When he’s home, I’ll do — differently; I won’t take — for granted,” you say to yourself.

And even when you inevitably fall short, you won’t have failed to notice what you want to shift. You won’t have failed to try. I’m sure I’ll have many parenting regrets, but I’m also sure these zoom-out weeks will soften them. It doesn’t have to be camp, obviously. Time at grandma’s works great, too. Whatever expands their world while yours contracts. A little heartbreak rehearsal.

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I drafted this from the family car, heading home from New England where me, Christopher, Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne visited Max at camp. It was wildfire-dim on Saturday, but on Sunday the air cleared in what felt like a trick of time. One day, our boy was away and the earth was ruined; the next we had the good old days again.

Max, Lloyd & Harry

The camp Max loves is a place out of time. Christopher and I found it through a friend we admire—he’s competitive and spirited, nurturing, humble and self-aware. He can name every American tree and never hoards a compliment. When I asked him about his influences, this place was his first answer.

For seven weeks, the boys live without electricity. They take cold showers before breakfast and spend much of the day maintaining their cabins, which were built by previous campers. “If we want music, we make it,” the director said when we first met. There are harmonicas everywhere; kerosene lamps after dark. The boys can’t wear clothes with brands because there are no marks of status. The whole ethos is about lifting each other up. “You never have to walk alone,” is a phrase often repeated. I wish every boy had a chance to become a man in this model.

Sunday morning, at chapel, we listened to ninety teenagers sing “It’s a gift to be simple.” We took Max to lunch at a box car diner in town, bought him a new pair of hiking boots (mine, which he’s worn for the last two years, finally started to pinch) and dropped him back, feeling less like we’d lost a son and more like we’d gained some decades. It could’ve been 1964 on the cabin deck overlooking the cleared view of the lake. It could’ve been 1921, 1906 or two decades before that.

We send Max to remember the kind of world we want to live in; the one the kids are going to have to build from these wildfire ashes, but they’ll do it together. We miss him, we wish for one more day with him, and in four weeks, we get him back. What a trick.

With love,

Isabel

I get sentimental this time of year, apparently.