From the Editor’s Desk: Kids (Premium)

We’re flying home tomorrow (Tuesday) and the past few days have been a bit of a blur. That’s true of all our trips to Mexico City. But our kids boarded a flight to Charlotte on Saturday after a week here, leaving us behind and feeling curiously empty. It was a good trip, a great trip, really. We rode in a hot-air balloon above the Teotihuacán pyramids the previous Monday, took a boat ride through the canals of Xochimilco and saw the sun rise next to the Popocatépetl volcano (El Popo, to the locals) on Thursday, and attended what ended up being a historic all-women Lucha Libre wrestling event on Friday night. And then the kids, who were here, were suddenly gone. Again.

It is an awful thing, being a parent. Wonderful. But also awful.

I’ve often observed—in that joking, not joking way—that kids are the highest highs and the lowest lows because it’s true. We dealt with both extremes on this trip in relatively minor ways, but it nonetheless served as a reminder of this strange dichotomy. Of how they make me so proud and yet so sad, so happy and yet so conflicted.

The central hypocrisy of raising children is that you must do so unselfishly, against all your instincts, so that these complex people who exhibit your best and your worst behaviors hopefully become good people who make the right choices in life. But you also have to say goodbye and let them go off independently and make those choices. And you have to stand by idly, frozen in fear and wanting to intervene, while they do.

This is perhaps obvious. It is also very difficult.

And I now find myself confronting another related hypocrisy. Having spent my adult life horrified by friends and acquaintances who were a little too involved in their own kids’ lives and could never seem to let go and let them fly on their own, I now die inside a little bit every time the kids visit and then leave, a regular reminder of some internal weakness. Our son Mark has been in Rochester, New York since 2016, before we even moved to Pennsylvania. And Kelly, our daughter, has been in Charlotte, North Carolina since that horrible pandemic year of 2020 after being denied a prom or a proper high school graduation.

And I could get used to it, that separation. Just as I could live with the occasional electronic nudges that interrupt it. “Do you know the password for Netflix?” my son texted me ahead of this trip so he could download something to watch on his phone. Or, “Do you know what Mom wants for her birthday?” from my daughter. These feel normal, the types of things that the kids would ask me. They help connect the time apart, and the distance.

But then I see them again, arriving together at the airport here in Mexico City, after a long day of flying. And I am instantly reminded of the people they are, how much I like to spend time with them, and how happy I am every time I think of how well they get along, how much they love each other, and how much they look out for each other. We saw this during the most recent trip, again. But it comes up from time to time during the separations. My daughter was going through a difficult time several months ago, and in speaking with her, my wife asked whether she had confided in Mark. Her answer, stated so simply, shouldn’t have surprised us. “We text every day. He’s known about this for weeks.” It makes my heart so happy it hurts.

Before their arrival, Stephanie and I were discussing our kids with some new friends and neighbors and my mind immediately went to one of a handful of pictures we have of them, taken many, many years ago in Paris, that perfectly encapsulates their relationship and, as importantly, who they are as people. I am positive I used this picture in a Premium article before, and possibly recently, but I couldn’t find it. So what the heck, I’ll use it (again) here. It’s one of my favorites.

That day, we had picnicked on the lawn of the Esplanade des Invalides, between the Seine and Napoleon’s final resting place. The kids finished before us and Mark, who gets bored easily and always likes to be doing things, especially some kind of physical activity, bounded up to run around the lawn like a puppy. Kelly, who’s more interested in reading and staying still, was nonetheless game because this was Mark, her brother, and she’s always been willing to go along for the ride if it means them spending more time together. And so she jumped up to go run around with him.

In the picture, Mark has grabbed Kelly’s hand so that they can run off together across this giant lawn. And Kelly, suddenly remembering we’re there too, looks back as if to shrug and say, “What are you going to do? It’s Mark!” I quickly snapped the picture and off they went. Two kids, a brother and sister, delighted to be doing something, anything, together. Delighted to have each other.

I wanted to show this picture to the neighbors and in the results of my search in Google Photos, a different picture of the kids came up, also in Paris, and also, in its own way, perfect. This one was taken a year earlier, during our first-ever home swap, and they were playing in one of those anachronistic playgrounds we always found in Europe, in the city’s southern suburbs. It’s the last of short set of photos of them posing on the top of some weird cement structure, and this particular pose is a wonderful combination of triumph and love, with one of Mark’s hands in a “V for victory” gesture, one of Kelly’s arm around his waist, and their other hands held in each other’s, aloft.

Flash forward 18 years, they’re young adults now, sort of adults who are independent but not truly independent. They have struggles and setbacks, and they have good moments. Importantly, they are the good people I’ve always wanted them to be. They met our friends here, including our neighbors, and I was not surprised to watch them all interact and get along with each other for all the same reasons my wife and I have. They also had what I think of as “that Mexico moment,” when this place evolves from being a nice destination to a special place that pulls at your heartstrings. Watching this unfold was special.

A few nights into their trip, we were walking back from dinner in Condesa, the neighborhood just to the west of our apartment, when I realized that we could shift south one block and stop by Tacobar, one of several places we wanted to make sure the kids experienced while they were here. Tacobar is both easy and difficult to explain. It’s a dive bar on an ostensibly seedy street that most gringos would avoid, but it is also everything that’s right about Mexico, meaning that it is authentic, iconic, and full of friendly, welcoming people. You can only get two things at Tacobar: Cocktails and tacos, and both are next-level incredible.

We went in to have a single drink at the bar with the kids so they could at least experience the place, and meet the bartenders there we’ve gotten to know a bit on this trip. And so we did just that, with a round of Margaritas, mine sin sal as always, intending to get back to the apartment at a reasonable time, given that it was a Tuesday.

As it turns out, you can get more than two things at Tacobar.

One of the bartenders, an artist in his own right, poured six shots on the bar, passed one over to each of us, and showed us the bottle. “This is my favorite tequila,” he said. “I want to share it with you.” And then all six of us—yes, the bartenders joined in—raised our glasses. “Welcome to Mexico!” he bellowed to the kids, with a huge smile on his face. Beautiful. Here we were, in this nondescript place, in the dark, late at night, and my kids were made to feel like they belonged. By people who live in a city in which we have never felt anything but welcome.

Mark was so impressed with this experience that the two of us stayed behind for another round when Steph and Kelly left. And we had our own father-son moment in which he went through the list of people here who had first embraced us as being part of the neighborhood and had now embraced him and Kelly too. I was happy they’d had this experience, but not surprised, just as I was happy and not surprised that he understood why this place and its people are so special.

We finally asked to pay and I was taken aback that the bill was much lower than expected, so I turned on my phone’s flashlight to examine it more closely. They had only charged us for the last two drinks, so I pointed out that we owed much more. No, I was told: Your wife had paid the bill. I looked at Mark and asked him if he remembered that happening, as I certainly didn’t. No, he said. I asked the bartenders if they were sure. They were. And so we paid and walked home.

When we got back to the apartment, Stephanie asked me how it was, and I asked her if she had paid the bill. No, she said. Are you sure? Yes. And so on Saturday, we dropped the kids off at the airport, experiencing that terrible emptiness again as they disappeared past security.

Emptiness. There is no other word. And nothing to do about it, so silently left the airport, listless, and took an Uber to a lunch spot close to Tacobar rather than to our apartment so that we could head over there afterward and pay our bill from Tuesday. And, I don’t know, maybe you saw this one coming. But I didn’t. They had simply covered most of the bill for us.

The next morning, Mark texted the rest of the family to ask us whether we had returned to Tacobar to settle the bill we owed. This kind of thoughtfulness comes naturally to him. So we told him the story, just another example of love and togetherness, of people being nice to others. It will be filed away in our kids’ brains, another data point informing their views of the world and perhaps impacting the decisions they make in the future in a positive way.

I could not be happier. But also sadder, because they are not here. It never stops.