My project

On January 1, 2026 at 4:43 am, a crystal clear thought shattered my slumber like an ice floe splintering over my head: 365 days to complete my project. I tried to temper the arctic gust of truth that had just shocked me into consciousness with pacifying thoughts that I was still on vacation, but the metronome tick of minutes counting down had commenced. It was all I could hear.

On a typical morning, the coffee machine would already be brewing, its burbling sounds and dried cherry chocolate smell wooing me downstairs like an inviting friend. By 5 am I would be settled in, trying to get an hour of focused work done before the deluge of emails and meetings started rushing in. Today, however, I didn’t even have a wifi password, let alone the gall to start making coffee before sunrise at our friends’ house where we were staying for the New Years’ vacation. I forced myself still, imagining I was still tightly wound in the cocoon that had shrouded us from the outside world over the preceding 48 hours.

From the moment Michael and I had shuffled our sleepy-eyed children onto the plane on December 30, the pages of the tear-away calendar had been left intact, time suspended at our 6:30 am takeoff. We had ascended into the clouds for Minnesota, my project left grounded below, stopped short like the abandoned construction site on 34th street that it once was.

The last few days of December constitute the loveliest time of the year when nothing is demanded of us. No holidays, no parties, no school, and no expectations - not even from myself. As we landed, snow swirling across the windows of the plane and obscuring buildings, pavement and trees into one white frosted landscape, all I could think of was that I had found a world where time was truly frozen still.

As we approached the airport’s exit, we felt the first lightning bolt of 10-degree air cutting through the corridors. I zipped the kids jackets up to their noses, already pink with wind burn. Sy and Michael hung back at the far end of the vestibule while Remi and I kept watch for our friends’ car at the front.

Remi positioned herself a few inches from the automatic door sensor, outstretching her arms and commanding the doors open like Moses parting the Red Sea. She closed her eyes and threw her head back every time the doors rushed open, giggling wildly as the icy wind tousled her hair and tingled her teeth like ice cream.

Over the following days, the Goldmans and our Minnesotan friends ambled through the hours as peacefully and playfully as we did through the snow. There was a desire for activity but without urgency. There were multitudes of topics to discuss, but none that had to be resolved. There were, of course, snow boots to wrangle, wet socks to replace, missing hats to find and vegetables that had to be eaten first, but none of which seemed as difficult to locate, swap or finish as they did at home.

Which is why it was so alarming to be awakened through the haze of an idyllic respite that my cold, hard, 365-day countdown had begun. The demarcation of my success on this project - the development of a 365-key hotel in Midtown Manhattan - will be obtaining the Temporary Certificate of Occupancy by the end of the year. It is finite. A piece of paper issued by the Department of Buildings that will demonstrate to investors, colleagues and myself that I did it. The deadline was scary, but also settling. Delineating discrete goals, and rallying my relentlessness to achieve them, is the defining quality of my identity.

How equally terrifying it was when I realized in those early morning hours of January 1, 2026 that a second deadline was upon me: the impending termination point of Sy and Remi’s childhood. They were a development project greater than any hotel or ground up building I would ever face, that had been racing by me without distinct project management. While completing construction on the hotel seemed like an overwhelming amount of work to accomplish in 12 months, knowing Sy and Remi’s childhood chapters would end in 60 was far scarier.

In just 5 years, Sy would be 14, Remi 12, their childhood coming to a close and their character nearly fully formed. An image of a Gantt chart flashed before me, their elementary years transformed into pastel bars on a piece of landscape-oriented paper. In my hotel project, I had analyzed the sequencing of construction for weeks, honing in on the events which comprised the critical path that directly drove the December 2026 completion: elevator machine room build out, con ed vault concrete pours, fire pump inspections. If these activities were delayed by one day, the completion date would subsequently shift.

My mind raced as I tried to establish what constituted my own children’s critical path. What were the events that made up those black diamond milestones on the page? If I couldn’t identify them, how would I ensure that those years of duration successfully stepped down across the page to the next phase of their lives? Or worse, without clear goals to achieve, how would I know if I had been a successful parent?

As I racked my brain to identify what my children’s equivalent to fire pump completion might be, it occurred to me that I could not plot their milestones because they were not mine to make.

My entire life had been defined by my achieving my own markers of progress: get into college. Get a job. Get married. Have kids - first one, then a second. Even the early stages of my children’s lives had easily defined demarcation points - they were supposed to weigh a certain amount, walk at a certain point, learn object permanence and develop spatial awareness. But now, unlike their infancy and toddler stages, where getting them to the other side of Years 1, 2 and 3 were accomplishments in themselves, as real individuals with their own games to win, recitals to participate in, and awards to receive, they decided what constituted success.

I squeezed my eyelids shut to try to blot out the image of their childhood chapters like a flipbook, the pages now whipping past my thumb as they sprouted into teenagers and drove off the frame to college. Michael and I hugged each other in front of the house, as it was just the two of us. It seemed so soon, and would be for so much longer, than it had been us four.

I opened my eyes to try to come back down to reality, but instead found my future self floating above the moment as if it had already passed. A tear inched down my cheek as I peered around the room, Sy sleeping on the couch and Remi curled up on an air mattress. Michael’s measured, steady breathing beside me. I mourned for the moments that had already escaped me, the phases I would never get back, the events that were already over.

The ones that I hadn’t prepared for or plotted on a chart were the hardest to lose; micro moments of pure bliss that crept up on me without warning. Remi cracking a hysterical joke, Sy teaching us his Fireball dance from camp, Michael making the kids squeal as he grabbed my waist and kissed me in the kitchen. These were moments that would never have been mapped out, and were perhaps even too small to individually remember, but when compacted into the bar between 2021 to 2031, would constitute the childhood phase of their Gantt graph.

While my hotel project demanded constant vigilance to ensure timely completion, my children’s formative years required something that was both easier but also the ultimate challenge: my energy. Those glorious flashes of giggles did not happen when I came home exhausted and stressed. In fact it was the opposite. “Mean Mommy!” my daughter would warn when she saw my pallid face at the end of a rough day. “Can you get a homework pass?” Sy asked one night, as Michael requested I leave the dinner table when I couldn’t put my phone away.

On these nights, rather than Remi wrangling her arms around my neck and enticing me to stay with jokes and stories, or sitting on the edge of Sy’s bed while his guard came down and existential questions came up, I crawled into bed alone to find my respite, Michael managing the two-person job as one. Those nights, or similarly those Sunday afternoons when I chose appeasing my anxiety to answer emails at home instead of cheering from the sidelines, I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d be missing, but I knew it was something. While I had no control over what the defining milestones of my kids’ lives would be, I did have the power to be present at them when they arrived.

I tossed to my side and let my eyelids close. Images of Sy sprinting down a court as a 16-year old, photos of him in our backyard with a corsage in his lapel. Remi reading from the torah up on the bimah, images of her wearing a lab coat as she accepted a degree. The tears welled more now, seeing them on stage, knowing that they would give the world everything that I had given to them. But only I would know if that everything had truly been my all.

It was my all - in the form of daily, consistent support and presence - that would ensure they found their own milestones to mark. Their own goals to achieve. Their own hotels to build.

I couldn’t do that if I was too exhausted from chasing my own. And with that, I fell back asleep, hopeful that I would summon all the energy I had for our last day of vacation.