Is This The Last Time?

The skills I've learned from 'Last Times'

Happy Friday Friends,

There will be a last time. For everything in your life, there will be a last time.

The last time you lost a tooth. The last time you ride a roller coaster. The last time you read to your daughter before she goes to sleep. The last time you get to drop off or pick up the kids from school.

For me, and likely for the parents in the audience, the last times you’ll be thinking about now are those with your kids.

Let me paint a little picture for you. It’s been one of those weeks. It’s finally Friday early evening, and I’ve just flopped on the couch. Maybe I'll take out my book, turn on some chilled tunes or get ready to watch some footy. My little darling child, still overflowing with energy even though it’s Friday, comes into the living room and asks you to play a game with me.

Me: “Daddy is really tired today, sweety. Why don’t you go ask your sister to play with you? Or do some drawing on your own, we can play later.”

You get me, right? It’s been a long week. I’m exhausted. And I’ve already played a few sessions of building the same memory game this week. But then I asked myself, what if this was the last time I ever got to play a memory game with my daughter? That changes everything.

Kids aren’t easy, we all know that. I often say they’re the hardest job I’ve ever had and will ever have. But we get such a short time of our lives with our kids, and the “lasts” stack up so quickly.

The worst part about these last times is we get no warning. These moments slip by quietly, without fanfare. They almost always go unnoticed until sometimes years later. Scroll back through your phone’s photo album to this time last year, I’m confident you’ll see a couple of photos with your kids where that was the last time you did that thing.

My 8-year-old used to LOVE swings. We’d go to the park, and she could spend the entire hour with me pushing her on one swing. Last weekend, we walked down to a park near us, and my 5-year-old jumped on the swing immediately and asked for a push. A few moments later, my oldest daughter got on the one next to us. She turned to me and also asked for a few “giant pushes.”

At that moment, I realised it was about a year or more since she’d asked me to push her on the swing. So, I savoured every single push.

Now, I don’t want to make this week’s post a sad one, so I’m going to share some of the learnings and skills I’ve been developing since becoming more aware of “lasts”.

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Thanks for reading.

Peace, love and growth.

Jarren Pinchuck