Time With a Daughter

Pause. Prioritize. Savor.

“You can come have lunch with me if you want.”

My 22-year-old daughter, Saela (say-lah) looked over her parked car at me, waited. She was headed to her on-campus job at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minn., where she’s a senior this year. Concordia is giving its students a couple of “mental-health days” today and tomorrow, so she’s back in her old room upstairs for a few nights.

I thought for a second…

“Ah… I can’t make it today,” I said, thinking about the work I needed to get done.

“O.K.,” she said, and climbed into her Nissan.

I turned and started walking away, back toward the house….

10 Minutes Away

Cassi and I got really lucky when our oldest child decided to attend a college within a few minutes of our house, but I doubt Saela would think of it that way.

She was one of the unfortunate kids whose senior year in high school got blown all to hell in the spring of 2020. COVID-19 pandemic. She walked out of Fargo South High on the afternoon of Friday, March 13 (how fitting), never thinking for a second that it would be her final day of in-person high school.

She’d been thinking about the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul for college, or perhaps the University of Iowa in Iowa City. There were a couple of other options I don’t recall, except that they were a good distance away, too. But with the pandemic everything was up in the air. Literally.

She decided to stay closer to home and chose Concordia, right across the Red River of the North from our home in Fargo, N.D. It’s literally less than a 10-minute drive.

At the time we weren’t even sure she’d be able to start college in the fall of 2020.

Never Pass It Up

If you’re on social media at all, you’ve probably noticed the same statistic I’ve been seeing a lot lately. I like what Mark Kennedy had to say about it in the Chattanooga Times Free Press:

“There’s an observation floating around the internet,” he wrote in July 2023. “It says that 75% of all the time you will ever spend with a child is complete by the time they reach 12 years old. And by the time they turn 18, well, 90% of your parent-child time together is already spent. I tried to find the origin of this fascinating hypothesis online, but I couldn’t. Still, it rings true.”

For sure. Every day closer I get to Saela’s graduation, the statistic seems to hold even more truth. And melancholy.

Let It Be

One of the best nuggets of wisdom I’ve ever come across is “Let life come to you.” In other words, don’t force things, allow events to unfold and, in my case, think before acting, reacting or judging.

I don’t believe in any of the gods worshipped in the world’s 3,500-4,000 organized religions, but I’ll tell you this: I pray for pause. I’ve been practicing it a lot lately. It’s a work in progress, to say the least, but I’ve also learned that life is all about progress, not perfection.

This morning my practice paid off.

Pause

… I turned and started walking away, back toward the house…

It took a few steps before it hit me: how many more times in my life would I have the good fortune, the joy of spending an hour or so over a meal with my daughter? 

I turned, walked back to the passenger side of her car. She cracked the window.

“Actually,” I said, “I can make it.”

A Full Day

I realized it wasn’t just lunch. It wasn’t just time with a daughter, either. It was time with my daughter. 

She already has a job lined up, and in July she’ll be headed out to begin her new life. Far away. In a different state. Probably an entire day of travel away.

I am going to miss her so much. Even more than I can imagine right now, I’m sure. So when the opportunities come, I will reprioritize my life and my work for the day, or several days if necessary. I’ve listened to the sages. I understand that with every passing year – and now, every passing month – the opportunities are going to be fewer and farther between.

I’m incredibly fortunate my circumstances allow me to drop everything, reprioritize and do this sort of thing on next to no notice.

10 Minutes Away

It took me only 10 minutes or so to drive over to Concordia from our house. Saela and I traded texts, tracked each other down and headed into Anderson Commons, the campus dining hall in the Knutson Campus Center.

I had a burger, fries, onion rings, succulent purple grapes, a small bowl of the always-satisfying vanilla bean ice cream and the best piece of coconut-crème pie I’ve ever tasted. I enjoyed every bite.

Even so, years from now I won’t remember what I ate, but I will remember this:

We sat at the end of a long, otherwise empty table. The midday sun shone through the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows on the south end of the hall, the natural light warming our time together. We chatted and ate, chatted and ate. I savored the moments with my daughter, enjoyed her smile.

Then, after a quiet pause while we both chewed our food, Saela said, “Remember in middle school when I didn’t want to be seen with you?”

“Yeah,” I chuckled.

“Now I ask you to please come have lunch with me.”

Oh, boy….

Pause