PST to EST

9/6/19

Dear Todd,

I'm not sure where this falls...somewhere between the perils of Adolescent Angst and Existential Sleep Deprivation I guess.

I feel really fortunate that we have two teenagers who want to talk to us. I just wish we all lived in the same time zone. Though we live in the same house, it's as if they are on PST and I am on EST and you...well you are nocturnal, but they don't interrupt you. It harkens back to the days when they would come pull me out of bed, the bathroom, or knee deep in a flooded basement and tell me that they were hungry. And I would enter the kitchen and see you in there...making a sandwich...and they NEVER EVEN THOUGHT TO ASK YOU. You discovered, at a very early parenting stage, the cloak of invisibility around the kids. Harry Potter could learn from your wizardly ways.

The hour at which they want to talk to us/me is anytime after 10 or 11pm. It's like waiting all day for the bud to bloom and then there is so much to share. And with two of them they could each easily push my bedtime back to 1am. In my head there is a middle-aged woman in middle-aged pajamas begging with the little people. Urging them to punch my time card and let me go home and go to bed. But instead, as I shift on the pillow to discreetly wipe the drool I say, "Really? Then what happened?" The answer....SO MUCH. SO MUCH HAPPENED...their brains just didn't get the memo until 10pm. It's like these little digital natives are analog when it comes to retrieving information.

If only I could DVR their thoughts and listen to them later. But, once the thoughts are gone, they are gone. It's all highly inconvenient. In addition to the need to cherish these moments of sharing and captured candor, the inside tip that all this SUPER IMPORTANT STUFF will be totally inconsequential by tomorrow afternoon, is the sand in the Sandman's grubby little hands.