The Gift of Time: Finding those Precious Pockets with your Parents
E137: Mother's Day Ideas + The family timeline exercise
God’s waiter just came over to our table and asked “need anything else?”
because the kitchen is closing soon.
Except the kitchen is my mom.
— Shaan Puri “Parents”
I read this paragraph and immediately my muse had me scrap my planned edition and write a short piece about how we manipulate time to find those pockets that allow us to make great memories.
There have been quite a few essays (Tim Urban’s The Tail End, Sahil Bloom’s It’s Later Than You Think) and tweets written on WHY we should consciously find time to spend with our parents. And the essay above (Shaan Puri’s Your parents are getting old, here’s what to do.) came loaded with a great selection of crowd-sourced ideas on HOW.
But is there a hack to figure out the answer to choosing WHEN?
… you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life.
— Tim Urban, Wait But Why, “The Tail End”
To know the elders in our family as humans, with their joys and dreams and memories, from a time before they reframed themselves to care for us, well … that is a special treasure. And to know this before our own relationship with them swivels from cared-for to carer.
Gift Yourself Time With Those You Treasure
I will forever be grateful for the gift of spending the past four months with my mother. — E129 RIP Mama
While I consider those final four months with my mother a 'gift,' they were also the culmination of strategic planning and deliberate decisions made a decade prior, stemming something I created called our family timeline.
The payback has been priceless. (You may recognize the timeline tool from “Root Problem/Jobless in Manhattan” in my book “Contours of Courageous Parenting - Tilting Towards Better Decisions”. It is a simple tool, process and conversation that allowed me to identify a better-than-others pocket of time in 2003 to move our young family from the USA to Canada, and travel around the world visiting 16 countries, allowing my children the luxury to create their own in-person relationship with my parents.)1
During a pivotal career swivel in 2013 I reached again for this simple tool. As I extrapolated the lives of the people around me for the coming two decades, some realities became glaringly obvious:
My three children were facing their most tumultuous years of high school and university. They were becoming increasingly independent.
I could not slow time on my parents’ aging. They were becoming increasingly dependent.
And I pray every night there was more I could do
To slow down the time and keep things the way I knew
— Everything’s Changing, The 502s
I faced a shrinking number of opportunities to spend time with these five special people in my life. At that point I made a decision to craft flexibility into my career so that I could consciously spend quality time with them and also support my siblings who’d taken on the role of day-to-day care of my parents in London. I chose to braid my career, my children and my parents in parallel. Because time refused to stand still to allow it to happen in series.
It was not obvious and has not been easy.
I’m sure I could have made more money if I’d opted to go corporate.
I now have no regrets.
Time has returned the best dividends on my choice to love deeply and in person.
“The compounding of choices”
James Bailey
That is how
reframed the value of the memories I had amassed in the intervening decade. The opportunity to spend crucial months with my father in London before he passed, and now the flexibility to spend months in India with my mother.Not knowing their end was so imminent, this was quality time. Less ‘caring for’ and more ‘memory-making’.
It was a time for casual conversations, beyond the ones we had regularly - first via phone, and now via video Whatsapp calls. I got to know them as individuals, beyond their role as my parent. We played Scrabble and Bananagrams, watched movies and cooked together. Our conversation would start on stories about their childhood and segue naturally into other areas - family oral histories that explained events that took prior generations from continent A across Ocean C to continent B; I got the gritty behind-the-scenes adult version and explanation of decisions made and explained to a then-ten-year-old. We talked about their friends, about the first time they ever flew, about relatives who passed before I was born.
Quality time. Before they ran out of breath and memories, and struggled for their words.
That is what I wish for each of you.
And the days fall off the calendar year after year
Now we're getting older
We've all moved out
— “Mother’s Kind of Love” The 502s
Face-to-face conversations are the best. And we may not each have enough vacation time to make those treks home. But maintaining a connection that makes it easy to just pick up a conversation again - Zoom, WhatsApp text, phone, letter, a visit - is really where the gold dust lies. Then, when you are able to connect in person engage fully, enjoy and remember those moments.
It could happen naturally. But for some of us, due to our life circumstances, it has to be a conscious, deliberate choice. So consider, can you tilt the future in your favour?
Do you have someone you’d like to share this essay with?
How
If you have access to Twitter/X I recommend reading the range of responses. But he condensed the best ideas back down into that essay.
And the easiest how:
For you younger readers, here is one of the simplest hacks he lists to stay in touch with your parents. It had me in fits of laughter because “Just show your parents what you did at school today” honestly hits so true. And I can tell you from experience that it still works when your mother is 86! I’d show her your comments on my essays, and I swear her heart would swell with pride in “her” achievement (me)!
It is just that easy!
Is there one easy way you have found to keep that connection with the important people in your life? Especially when time is at a premium?
3 Conversations + 1 Tweet + 3 Essays
Thank you to
, and for your conversations that inspired the memories and topic for today and to the indefatigable whose tweets allow me to keep my finger on the pulse of everything interesting in this world.Links to the three essays:
Tim Urban The Tail End
Sahil Bloom It’s Later Than You Think
France - Spain - UK
For our European Tribe Tilters, DM me. I’ll be in France-Spain-UK during May and June. If you are doing meetups, or we can connect over coffee, it will be a joy to meet you in person and add to my collection of IRL photos!
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Wishing you and all those you love a wonderful season of joy, peace and recovery.
Stay healthy. From there all else becomes possible.
Until next week.
Karena
Playlist fueling today’s essay - The 502s - introduced to me by my daughter:
For our new readers, I come from a geographically distributed family. My husband is Canadian, and we chose to raise our family here. My parents were based in London, UK, and we have strong ties to Goa, India. Our network of siblings and cousins cover every continent and stretch from New Zealand to Vancouver. We travel to be with family.
“I chose to braid my career, my children and my parents in parallel.”
Makes me smile so big. What a gift you are. To them and to us.
So good! I just read the Shawn Puri article because of this. And this line got me, “They are the only people on earth who care about you more than you even care about yourself.” Thank you for sharing it!