The Logistics of Being There

I have said the same goodbye enough times that I could time it. A duffel bag by the door, a hug held a beat too long, a car pulling out of a driveway while three kids wave from a window. It never gets shorter. It gets more practiced.

For years now my life has run on two states. Half the calendar in one, half in the other, business built where the work is, kids growing up partly in front of me and partly on a screen. Nobody plans a childhood that way on purpose. It's what happens when the work that pays for everything and the people you're doing it for don't live in the same place.

The mechanics of it are boring and unavoidable. A shared calendar color coded by whose week it is. Flights booked around a business schedule that doesn't know or care about a school schedule. A bag packed the night before so an early departure doesn't turn into a scramble at the door. None of that photographs well and none of it feels like fathering while you're doing it. It's the scaffolding that makes the actual fathering possible once I'm finally standing in the room.

The Marine Corps trained a specific kind of goodbye into me. Quick, controlled, no lingering, because lingering makes it worse for everyone standing there. I used that training for years without noticing I was using it. Then I became a father and realized it was built for leaving a base, not for leaving a nine-year-old standing in a doorway. Those turned out to be different skills, and I had to unlearn part of the first one.

I expected the distance to hurt, and it does. What actually surprised me is how much presence turns out to be a decision made well in advance. If I wait until I'm standing in front of my kids to decide to be present, I've already lost most of the value. The decision has to get made days earlier, in how I plan the trip, what I say no to at work, whether the phone comes to the dinner table.

Two states means I don't get default access to the small stuff. The mundane Tuesday where nothing happens and everything happens anyway, the two minutes after school where a kid tells you something they'd never repeat later. I miss most of those. I've made peace with missing most of those. I haven't made peace with pretending it doesn't cost anything, because it does, every time.

There's a piece of this I didn't expect either. Being away for half the calendar means trusting somebody else with the daily version of my kids' lives, the mundane Tuesday I just mentioned belongs mostly to a parent who isn't me on any given week. Learning to be grateful for that instead of quietly guilty about it took longer than I want to admit. Guilt is the easier feeling. It doesn't require trusting anyone but yourself.

So I've gotten deliberate about the parts I can actually control. The trip gets planned around them, work waits, the phone goes in another room. I show up the way I used to show up before a fire show, fully in it, because I only get a fraction of the hours other fathers get and I refuse to spend them half-present out of habit.

I don't know if this is the right way to raise three kids across two states. I know it's the way I'm doing it, and I know the goodbyes still don't get easier no matter how practiced they get. Some things aren't supposed to.