I was cleaning out a drawer in Frisco when I found a photograph of my son Jack. He was six. Gap-toothed, sunburned across the nose, holding a plastic kickboard like a trophy. I do not remember who took the picture. I remember the kickboard.
Jack is a grown man now. He works with me. He drives himself to dinner. The photograph and the man do not live in the same world, and the distance between them is what I had been refusing to count.
I went and got a notebook. I sat at the kitchen table and did the math the way I had spent twenty-five years doing math for other people's companies — Honeywell, Invensys, Schneider Electric, fifteen countries, the kind of career where you learn that the number is the number whether you like it or not.
Eighteen summers. That is the cap. From the year your child is born until the year they leave. Eighteen summers under one roof. After that, they come back as visitors, and a visit is not the same as living together.
Subtract the early ones. Children do not form lasting autobiographical memory until somewhere around age five. The summers before that are real — the sunscreen on the nose, the wet footprints on the kitchen tile — but they are not the ones your kid will narrate back to you when they are thirty. So thirteen are left, give or take.
Subtract the last few. By fifteen, sixteen, your child is technically home and mentally already gone. There is a girlfriend. There is a job at the smoothie shop. There is a group chat you are not in. They are with you, but the summer belongs to other people.
What is left is the middle. Roughly ages five through fourteen. Ten summers that are fully theirs and fully yours at the same time. Ten.
I counted mine. I had not been present for as many of them as I thought.
That sentence took me a long time to write. I am not going to soften it now.
I was a corporate IT executive across three continents. I was good at it. I was also gone — Singapore on a Tuesday, São Paulo by Friday, a Tokyo airport hotel where the toothbrush is wrapped in plastic and the kettle takes a coin. Some of those summers I was a father in residence. Some I was a father by FaceTime. The math does not lie about which was which.
I am not writing this to apologize to my son. We talk about it. He is fine, I am fine, the relationship is strong, and there is no ledger to settle. I am writing this because I want you to count yours before the photograph is in a drawer instead of on the counter.
The framing is not new. The number for you is.
A writer named Tim Urban put this idea into a viral essay in 2015 called “The Tail End.” His version: by the time a child graduates high school, they have already spent about ninety-three percent of the in-person time they will ever spend with their parents. The remaining seven percent stretches across the next sixty years.
The math is brutal and it is correct. But abstract math does not move people. People move when the number has their kid's name on it. So we built the calculator. You put in one age. You get back two numbers — summers left and summers they'll remember. That's it.
What to do with the number.
The mistake is to treat the answer as a verdict. It is not. It is a calendar. A small, finite, manageable calendar that you can plan around the same way you plan around a quarterly close.
Here is what works:
Block one week per summer that does not move. Not a work-from-the-lake-house week. A no-laptop, no-call, no-deal week. Put it on the calendar a year in advance. Tell your team in January. By the time the conflict tries to land in July, the calendar has already won.
Pick the summer ritual. Not the big trip. The small repeatable thing. Same lake, same cabin, same diner on the way home. Kids remember the repetition, not the novelty. A trip to Disney once is a story. Pancakes at the same diner every July is a childhood.
Stop optimizing the summer. The summer is not a project. It does not need a slide deck. The boredom in the middle of an August afternoon — the kid lying on the carpet watching the ceiling fan — is the thing they are actually going to remember. Leave room for it.
Tell your child what number you got. Not in a heavy way. Just casually, over breakfast: “You know we have about nine more summers together before you head to college, right?” It changes how the next nine feel. For both of you.
A word about guilt.
Some of you reading this are going to put a number into the calculator and feel a stab of guilt about the summers already behind you. I felt it. It is honest, and it is also useless.
The summers you missed are gone. The summers you have left are not. That is the only sentence that matters. Guilt about the past does not buy you a single Tuesday afternoon in July of next year. A blocked week on the calendar does.
I grew up in Ouanaminthe, Haiti. My mother raised us with no margin to spare, and she still found the hot summer afternoons. The thing I remember from her is not the trips we did not take. It is the presence on the porch, late nights eating hot cassava with peanut butter and a glass of hot milk. That is the bar. It is lower than you think and harder than you think at the same time.
Count the summers. Pick the ones you are going to be present for. Then be present for them.