Nine great summers.
It’s a line that gets shared with most parents.
That you get nine great summers with your kids.
The implication is that during their first summer, they are too small to care and that from the age of twelve onwards, they aren’t that excited to spend the whole summer with you.
For me, that means my two kids are sitting here on the chart.
Sobering.
A similar anecdote says that 75% of all the time you will ever spend with a child is complete by the time they reach 12 years old. And by the time they turn 18, 90% of your parent-child time together has passed.
My first reaction on hearing all this was:
I can hack that. We’ll travel every winter with my kids, so we get double the summers.
Kaitlin and I are on track to be such cool parents, that our kids will want to spend EVERY summer with us.
But… despite our best intentions, if everyone's saying it, it will probably be true for us too.
It’s made me think about what I remember from my nine summers as a kid.
Strangely, the strongest memory was the light. A late afternoon, early evening kind of light that reached out to me through the torn flyscreens of my grandparents’ house. Then it was how my skin felt: red with sunburn, a crunchy layer of salt from the sea against the couch I sat on with my granddad as he told jokes. I remember a raspberry popsicle. I remember the cricket on TV, Michael Bevan hitting a four on the last ball to beat the West Indies. But that light, I really remember that light.
I’ve just had a summer with my kids, and the nine summers idea made me say ‘YES’ every time they asked if we could play soccer on the back lawn. They both caught their first fish. And we had ice cream, lots of ice cream. I saw the light quite a lot too, and each time it came to say hello, I gave it a little place in my memory.