Parent Mode

how long has it been?

During my weekend trip to my parents’ place, we had a big get-together with family and friends. There, I talked to an aunt and uncle who were watching their two grandkids while their parents went on a week-long couple’s getaway. I see my uncle—a parenting veteran of four kids—first, and I ask him how it’s going. He gives a theatrical groan.

“She [the three-year-old] asked for pancakes. I made her pancakes. Then she said, no, she didn’t want pancakes, she wanted waffles. So I said okay, and I made her waffles. Then she took one bite of her waffle and pushed it away! Then she said she wanted fruit, so I asked if she wanted an apple, and she said yes, but then she said she didn’t like apples, she just wanted to watch TV!”

“Oh man,” I said. “Yep, that’s pretty much my life. Threenagers are something else.”

“For real,” he said, then with a grin, “I’m just glad tomorrow I get to go to work and leave them with your aunt.”

“Must be nice,” I say.

He laughs. “Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Seriously, though, I’m loving the quality time with them—but I had forgotten how hard it was.”

I nod, a little lost in thought. Then I ask: “How long have you had them again?”

“Oh, they dropped them off yesterday.”

---

I go find my aunt, who is helping the one-year-old toddle around the party.

“How’s mom life going?” I ask her.

“Oh, it’s good!” she says. “Fun to get to hang out with these little ones.”

“I mean, they’re pretty adorable. She’s walking already?”

“Well, not really yet, but you can tell she wants to. Your uncle is determined to have her fully walking before her parents get back.”

“That is…diabolical,” I say.

She laughs. “That’s classic [uncle’s name].¹”

“I love it. So you aren’t going crazy?”

“Oh, I mean, it’s tough. It’s been an adjustment for sure. But it wasn’t too long before I flipped back into Parent Mode. You know, where you don’t really have your own life at all. Since then it’s been fine!”

I nod, and stare off into the distance. Parent mode. That’s what that is. When did I leave my lawyer job to stay home with the kids, like 2020? So that means I’ve been in Parent Mode now for…six years?

---

Later that night, after the guests have left, the borrowed canopies have been folded and stowed, and the folding chairs have been returned to their lenders, my parents, siblings, and their spouses and kids all go to the basement. The plan was to watch family videos of our childhood. So somebody dug up two DVDs that say “Call Home Videos.”

But it turned out that it wasn’t Call as in my dad and mom’s family, it was Call as in my dad’s dad’s family. So when the DVD starts to play in the old and miraculously functional DVD player that someone managed to procure, what we saw were silent Super 8 videos from the late fifties to the mid-seventies.

I saw my grandmother, who passed about ten years ago, as a young lady—like fifteen years younger than I am now. I saw my grandfather, who I had just seen earlier that day, as a young buck himself, hair dark, features dashing.

I had seen a picture or two of that era, but I had never seen them moving through space, smiling, interacting. And I saw them with their children—children the age of my children. I saw my dad splash on the scene as a baby. He was just a baby, like my little baby. Now he’s…not a baby.

By the time I was born, my grandparents had been out of Parent Mode for a good long while. I’ve known them for decades, always as veteran grandparents, as I had many much-older cousins. That chapter closed so long before I had awareness that I couldn’t have even pictured it. I might have accepted that it happened in a sort of theoretical way, but not For Real, not real like my life is now, with three little kids climbing on me every day, with the three-year-old pushing his sister’s head away if she gets too close to his toys like a territorial gorilla, with a six-year-old who has told me almost every day since her birthday “since I turned six, I have been having a lot of emotions,” with a backpack that I take everywhere full of diapers and wipes and goldfish in baggies, with a 6am Tom Alarm every morning, with pancakes no waffles no apples no TV! TV!! TV!!, with the smiles and the snuggles and the letter when I get home from a trip and the giggles and the tickles and the moments that feel like memories even when you’re in the middle of them.

I wonder if my grandparents ever felt like they’d be in Parent Mode forever.

1. His name isn’t actually "[uncle’s name],” I’ve changed it here for privacy reasons.