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 t...