We have two more days of just Dada and Jettie before the weekend arrives and school begins. She is ready. More than ready, really. She loves her school. She misses her friends. She’s excited about everything waiting for her on the other side of summer, and I’m excited for her too.
I just wish summer didn’t have to end.
There is a selfishness in parenting that I don’t think we talk about enough. We spend all this time helping these little people grow, and then occasionally have the audacity to wish they would stop doing exactly that.
I love the person Jettie is becoming. Watching her grow into herself is one of the great honors of my life. I wouldn’t trade the person she’ll be tomorrow for the person she is today. I just wish I didn’t have to trade at all.
Because there will be more summers, but there won’t be another this summer. Next June, she’ll come running out of school a slightly different person. New interests. New jokes. New questions. A little more of the world inside her. And I’ll love that Jettie every bit as much as I love this one. But she won’t be this one.
Maybe that’s why the end of summer feels different as a parent. As a kid, summer ending meant going back to school. As an adult, it meant little more than a change in weather. But as a stay-at-home dad, I’ve learned that summer is its own tiny lifetime. For a few months, I get my little buddy back full-time. The house fills with her noise and stories and elaborate plans. Then August arrives and suddenly I have to give the days back.
The house gets quiet.
I’ll paint. I’ll have hours to work and think and make things again. I’m genuinely looking forward to that. But if someone offered me a bargain—give up painting forever and you can keep hanging out with this kid all day—I’d throw the brushes away without hesitation. Of course, that’s not the bargain. The bargain is better and harder: I get to watch her become.
I don’t want school to rush that becoming. I don’t particularly care whether she comes home thinking about colleges or careers or what she’s going to be when she grows up. There will be plenty of time for the world to ask her those questions. Right now, I want her to have room to play. To make friends. To invent stories. To learn because the world is fascinating rather than because knowledge must eventually become useful.
I want her to have the space to remain a kid while she still is one.
And tomorrow, for one of our last days of summer, we’re going on a squishy hunt through town. Nothing monumental. Nothing designed to become a treasured childhood memory. Just Dada and Jettie driving around looking for ridiculous little squishy things. Which, come to think of it, might be exactly what I’ll miss.
I know what’s next is going to be wonderful.
I’m just not quite finished with what’s now.