Children Learn What They See

When my husband and I were newly married, for about the first 10 years or so, we lived a little bit over an hour from his Grandma Frech. What would be a short drive for us now that we live in Dallas, seemed like a trek back in those days. Visits to Grandma’s house were never spontaneous. We planned them weeks in advance, and rearranged our whole lives in order to be able to spend time at her house. Often those excursions necessitated an overnight stay due to our difficulty in traveling with young children. Because it was such an ordeal, we only went to see her three or four times each year.

At the end of each visit, my husband and I would lament how infrequent our visits were and resolve to go see her more often – once a month or every other month at the most. It never happened. Life got in between us and our good intentions, and we never made it up to see her as often as we would have liked. I’m sure she understood, somewhere under the disappointment she must have felt. Our lives were busy, and she just wasn’t at the top of our list of priorities. She settled for our infrequent phone calls, because she really didn’t have much choice. She never called us, I’m not sure why, but she patiently waited for us to find a moment of time for her.

It has been a common enough story in the life of our family, and those of most of the families we know. The busyness overtakes us, and something, somewhere has to give. More often than not, the thing that we let go of is our family. It isn’t even a conscious decision most of the time, it’s just the easiest in the moment. Grandmothers are more understanding than bosses, and family picnics can always be attended when they come around again next year.

I wish that I would say it was different with our other family members, but we all just seem so busy all of the time. Phone calls happen in the stolen moments during the car ride on the way to somewhere else. We exchange birthday gifts, and the thank you noted that actually happen to make it into the mail. We speak more in text messages than in person, and for some we only see them face-to-face on major holidays.

While I often missed our family members and thought about the missed opportunities to see them with regret, it wasn’t something that I ever really sought to change. Our phone conversations may have always included the phrases “I miss you” and “I wish we could see you more often,” but none of us ever really made an effort for anything to be different. We were all still busy, the children are all still a lot to travel with, and we would often get huffy and think about how much easier it would be for the childless relatives to come and see us than the other way around.

And that’s how we’ve been raising our children – with the reality that family is something you fit in when there is time for them, and not the people you love and make the time for. We’ve taught them that life and social obligations come first….and now we are reaping what we’ve sown.

Our eldest daughter left for college last year. She’s only twenty minutes up the road, but it might as well be half a world away. We hear from her only rarely, most often in response to our repeated text messages. She never calls, and has only seen our family two or three times this semester. That quick shot up the highway is too far away, and too much of a time commitment. She is busy. She has school and work, and all of the social obligations which come from being both in a sorority and a serious relationship. Her life is running along at full speed, and she is making the same choices that she saw her parents make for the whole of her life. She’s dropping the easy and understanding part, and counting on her family to know how complex life can be when you’re the person in charge of it.

As much as it devastates me, I do get exactly where she’s coming from. She’s following perfectly in the path that we trod. Everything that can’t wait first, there will always be another family gathering next year. She gets that from us. We have no one else to blame.

Except there won’t be.

That’s the heart-rending lesson that we’ve had to learn the hard way. Children get tired of waiting for you to notice them, even close families can drift apart, grandparents…and then parents die. People stop having family picnics when the rest of the family is always too busy to be there. It’s just not sustainable.

All that we can do now is keep inviting her to join us, and set a better example for her and her younger siblings. Our priorities have gotten seriously turned around, and no one can fix that except us.

We’ve started writing family events on the calendar first, and sucking our courage to tell other people no. We’ve skipped games and practices this fall just for the sake of making it to family events. We’ve told coaches that sports are less important than people, and dared them to disagree. My husband has gone against his habit and begun using his days off from work (instead of letting them expire at the end of the year) to spend our children’s birthdays with them. I’ve set up reminders on my phone to call family members, actually scheduling times that I know will be good for them. I’ve been adding them into my call schedule one at a time so that I don’t get overwhelmed, so if I haven’t started calling you yet, I will soon. And we’ve been planning day trips to see the people we love. The driving may be brutal, and traveling with kids is always a challenge, but it’s worth making the effort. Always. There’s not a trip home that we’ve regretted or a hug that we could have gone another moment without.

The truth is that we miss our families terribly, and we haven’t been behaving as if we do. We’ve been acting as though jobs, hobbies, and extracurriculars are the things we can’t bear to miss when what we really can’t stand to miss are the smiles and presence of those we love most in this world. It’s taken us way too long to get our priorities straight, but we’re getting there now. I hope that my children take notice. We’ve learned the hard way that they learn to live what they see, and so we have to make sure that we like what that is.