3 min readIT’S JUNE OF 2022, and I’m driving my teenage daughter to the Seattle airport. It’s an hour drive each way. She’s meeting up with her class for a once-in-a-lifetime, 10-day school trip to Europe. This is something that was in the works for over a year. The trip was expensive, and we had been paying in installments, the last payment just debited from our pandemic-depleted checking account.
I’d recently made the transition to full-time writer, and while things were starting to look up, the cost associated with the trip was a struggle. As such, I was extra careful to make sure that my daughter was prepared. Passport. Check. Plane tickets. Check. Spending money. Check. Carefully curated, carry-on-only bag. Check. Traffic was awful, but we made it. And then, as we were pulling into the parking garage: “Dad, I think I forgot my glasses.”
“Fuck.”
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
While that quote, first attributed to Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke in 1871, was about flexibility on the battlefield, it could just as easily apply to modern parenting.
In this case, your enemies have surrounded you on all sides and are rapidly closing in on your position. The enemy is this idea that you must be the best parent you can be. The enemy is your ever-growing to-do list. Your obligations. Self-care. Working. Exercising. Eating well. Maintaining your home. Being responsible with money. Carving out actual quality time to spend with your kids. With your partner. (Remember them?) Someday actually sleeping. The enemy is doing everything you need to do as a father and still being able to function as a person. Your enemy is time.
As I write this, my 22-year-old daughter is pregnant. This isn’t the one with the glasses, but her older sister. That’s the same age my wife was when we had our first of four children. What the hell, man? It seems like my daughter was in kindergarten like, yesterday.
Because I can’t Bill-and-Ted my way to more time, my approach has been to accept that I simply can’t allow myself, as a parent, to do everything. This is where some self-help guru would spout off some nonsense or drop a nugget of wisdom. They’re full of crap. I’m not going to pretend to know WTF the answer is to any of this, and frankly, I wouldn’t trust anyone who has a one-size-fits-all answer either.
How do you do it all?
My children are all now grown, and I never answered that question. I did my best. Some things slipped. Some things got forgotten. Some chores never got done. And I think that’s okay.
I was flexible on the battlefield. My expectations were reasonable. As I learned in Boy Scouts: Be Prepared. (And since you can’t truly prepare for everything, it’s more of a mental exercise.) That’s all you can do. Give yourself—and your kids—some grace. That’s it. That’s the secret. At least it was for me.
Don’t ask me how we got in the car, sat in traffic for an hour, made it to the airport, and entered the garage without my daughter (or me) noticing that the things that allow her to literally see weren’t sitting on her face.
We had a choice with the glasses. We could say “screw it,” and she could go and not see the Parthenon and the Coliseum and everything else. Or I could attempt to challenge the very concept of time and race home and back.
In the end, it worked out. We had a backup pair of glasses in the glove box that I remembered at the last possible moment. Glasses that had been placed there by my wife—who wasn’t even in the Boy Scouts.
Matt Dinniman is a writer, artist, and musician (well, he's a bass player) from Gig Harbor, WA. He is the author of several books, including the bestselling Dungeon Crawler Carl series.
