Finding Time for our Adult Kids: A Former Homeschool Mum’s Lament

There was a time when it seemed I might not ever be short on adventures with my kids. I loved planning excursions, some bigger and others smaller, and even little micro adventures. 

Within the first year of belonging to our homeschool group, I joined the field trip committee and then the adventures were ON! They became a weekly, if not more frequent, part of our lives.

 I had more adventures individually than any of my children had because while many of the things we did were collective, some were not whole family events and often I organized one to one time. Now of course they were still living life during the time I was off with another child, but it was still different. 

I had heard from parents of all kinds of styles that during the teenage years, we would take up a very small space in our child’s mind and would have much less time with them. 

This was not actually the way things played out for us. 💓 Between teens who actually did want to be with me or at least still have family adventures, combined with the integral role in organizing and getting kids where they wanted or needed to be, the teenage years ended up being a LOT of parenting. A lot. 😊 

Even though they were branching out to their own adventures with other people, there was still a high degree of need for rides and organizing and a general awareness of their schedules. 

Because the desire to spend time together never left my kids during those years in the way I’d heard that it would, it kind of stopped me in my tracks when I realized it was the practical details of young adult life that made it hard to find common time:

Work and study schedules that seem relentless at times

Recreational commitments

Partners and partners’ families

Their own beginnings of marriages and families

My own increased paid work 

The strangest paradox is that I am still so busy at times with the details of their young adult life —  sharing vehicles for work, cosigning for apartments, caregiving for little ones, preparing for bridal showers and weddings, continuing to organize birthday celebrations. To be honest, I’m busier than I would like to be (hopefully they aren’t reading this post 😂), but what is in short supply is just free, spontaneous time to adventure together. 

So when my 21-year-old daughter and I had a common day open from early morning through late night, we seized it.

We drove five hours to the most southern part of Canada — not just the most southern part generally, but actually on the piece of land on the beach that is the furthest you can stand on that is on mainland Canadian soil. 

We went to a local city for dinner and walked the waterfront of the Detroit River, looking across the very close Canada/US river border at the Detroit skyline. 

We drove back late into the night, accompanied by the rising of a gorgeous orange moon that was yellow and high in the sky by the time we reached home. 

And I just keep thinking how there are some pockets in our life that are truly more defining than others. Days and hours and minutes that we make an intentional decision to close off everything else and focus just on time with one person or a few people and those are the things that make memories.

But memories that aren’t just nostalgic. 

Core experiences and feelings of belonging with other people that transcend the actual activity itself. We just need the activity as a vehicle to the deeper connection.

Because the reality is that it was a long time to sit in a car, the bugs were pretty bad, the bird life we had hoped to see, on this particular day at least, was actually much less than it would have been in our own backyard, and the arrival time at the river in the city was later than ideal.

And there were things we didn’t agree about, so compromises were made. 

That’s all part of it! 

The long drive was remedied by a carefully crafted playlist L had made for me that I found so touching. The new binoculars she purchased on the way in served as a point of humour when we realized we weren’t coming upon many birds to zoom in on 😂, and the later arrival to the city just meant we enjoyed the moments of sunset before us. 

But back to the lament:

I miss the days when at least one of my kids was always available to accept an invitation I offered or to extend their own. I’m conscious that much of our connection is in practical tasks and supporting rather than adventuring. I notice that we catch up on each other’s experiences more than we have them together. But to a large degree, that’s part of the process of kids becoming adults, even in a close-knit family. 

So this piece of writing doesn’t close with a neatly tied -up ending or an answer.

It’s just a mum expressing gratitude for 19.5 hours with her daughter on a day they both had off from work and other responsibilities. 

And a reminder to seize the moments together that you can. ❤️

Thoughts? Experiences? I’d love to hear!