Several years ago, I read a post in the blog Wait But Why that said roughly: “By the time you turn 18, you’ve already spent 90% of your time with your parents.”
Tim Urban then illustrated his point using stick-figure men and childish drawings (as he always does), showing that compared to our childhoods, we spend very little time with our parents after we’ve grown up. We spend about 90% of the time until our twenties hit and the remaining 10% is spread out across the next several decades.
I remember feeling sad reading about it.
When you’ve grown up, each moment spent with your parents could be one of your last. (Or one of your many lasts.) Nobody wants to think about it in these terms but it’s true.
This happens not just because people age, get sick, and die but also because people grow apart. The older you get, the more you become engrossed in your affairs, and the less you need your parents to be involved. Your parents too might want to get retired and live “for themselves” too – we all tend to treat our parents as creatures designed only for our well-being and pleasure, but they are people and men and women too.
At some point, before you know it, you realise the bitter truth: everyone is an adult, you are one too, everyone has their own life to live, and you’re basically on your own.
(Perhaps one of the reasons people have kids is to feel like they are in a family unit all over again. For many, being without a unit – on their own, alone – is too much to take.)
It’s hard to get used to, but it’s an important part of growing up and moving on.
Still.
Whenever I get to be around my family, it feels nice. I try to cherish every moment and make mental snapshots in my mind, knowing that this might be the last time we meet together like this.
Not because somebody is going to die – hopefully not! – but because it’s hard to get eight people from three different continents together at one point in space and time. Even when you plan a year in advance.
I am writing this to you from a family getaway in Turkey. My mom came here with her new husband from Moscow. My wife’s Ukrainian parents came. And so did my sister and her boyfriend, from the Netherlands. To meet me and my wife, who flew from London. It feels nice to be together.
But it also feels weird.
I get emotional and start acting all irrational whenever I am with my family – aren’t we all? – and when there’s so much family together, it quadruples.
And because I now meet my family about once or twice per year, especially with the war and certain travel restrictions imposed on our Russian passports, I notice how everyone changes.
And they get to notice how I change.
And because we both change, our family dynamic changes as well.
Watching us spend time together, I can’t help but think that while you do see your family less often when you grow up – and true, the sad math is that the remaining 10% of the time with your family is spread out across decades – those are very valuable 10%.
Perhaps they are even more valuable than the 90% you had when you were growing up, the angry and bitter and stupid teenager you were. (Or shitting and pissing and screaming infant that you also were.)
And perhaps Tim Urban’s sad math is not sad at all. Perhaps quantity is not what matters when it comes to meaningful relationships. Quality of time spent and the fact that you are both curious about what kind of people you both become as time goes by matters much more than being around a lot.
Finally, perhaps the secret to having a good relationship with your family is not to force it. David Sedaris once joked that the collapse of any marriage comes from too much time spent together or having too much free time. And one of my friends says, “The secret to having a decent relationship with your parents is to see them as rarely as possible.”
It’s hard to argue, there’s truth to both.