You’ll Miss This One Day

Chances are something your kids are doing is bugging you today.

Your daughter keeps interrupting you and you can’t believe she can’t find the crayons by herself.  You keep falling asleep reading this blog post because your son was up five times last night.  Or you suspect that at bedtime tonight your three year old will ask you to read him the same story for what must be the 582nd time.

I’m just telling you, you’ll miss those days.  You’ll even miss the things that are frustrating you right now.

For me, a frustration point was camping.  My family loves to camp.  I don’t.  (I can’t understand for the life of me why people would give up comfort for misery.)  But multiple times over the years, we would pack up the family, head north and I would pray for it not to rain.  I suppose I didn’t pray well enough in those moments.  Inevitably, the tent would get wet.  And I would get miserable.

But talk to my boys today and they’ll tell you they loved camping – still do.

It amazes me that even now, as my sons are teenagers, I look back on my life as a dad five or ten years ago and ask myself “So why exactly did that annoy me so much?  Can someone remind me?”  I anticipate that a decade from now, I will wonder why anything bothered me.

I was talking to my wife Toni about this and asked her what she now missed that used to bother her.  She said it was probably the dependency.  Some of you are longing for adult conversation, for even 15 minutes of free time right now.  And the fact that you might not get it today or tomorrow is making you desperate.

But then Toni shared something (as she often does) that crystalized the insight for me.  She said “But those moments of dependency were also moments of great intimacy.  Dependency and intimacy are linked.”

She’s so right.

I’m sure there’s a handful of things you won’t miss.  But chances are the things that are bugging you in the daily grind are moments you will one day miss and perhaps the very things that are laying the foundation blocks for something good in the future.

Fast forward to today and I’ll show you two teenage sons who have a great relationship with their mother.  What was frustrating in moments then is making our lives so much richer now.

And I can show you a couple of boys who still love camping.

How about you?  What do you already miss?  How is what’s bothering you today something that might be a source of something good for you in the future?