Issue 4 - The Tax
The boys were being boys in the next room. Wild, loud, comfortable in their own house, the way they should be. Her eyes found mine. Held a beat longer than a glance. I’d been home twenty minutes and she’d already told me more than any of the calls had.
I never said the phrase out loud. Quality over quantity. But when I was traveling, or out doing something that kept me from being around, it sat quietly in the back of my head. A nudge to make the hours I did have count. Which was true, and fine, and right up until it wasn’t. Parents can’t always be present - that’s real. But at some point the honest version becomes a crutch, and you’re leaning on it to explain away the fact that you chose, again, to be somewhere else.
What my kids needed was quieter than quality. They needed two people in the house who backed each other. Day after day. When I went offline the system didn’t run at reduced capacity. It ran on my wife. The boys didn’t escalate because I was missing. They escalated because what mom said used to also be what dad said, and now it was one voice. Inconsistent and without reinforcement. She absorbed the difference.
I’d come home and read the house. My wife is (very) tidy, and when things were out of place I knew the week had been harder than she said. When things were clean I knew it was harder than that, because she’d done the maintenance on top of everything else. The kids’ mannerisms told me something. Their speech told me something. Her face told me the most and she didn’t have to say a word.
Travel is the obvious version. I’d just come back from a 100k in the NorCal mountains. Ninety-plus degrees, fourteen thousand feet of climbing, a cutoff that put you into DNF territory if you didn’t move. As an average runner in that world, that chased me. It was a great few days out with even greater friends. I was still carrying some of the pride of finishing when I walked through the door. I’d chosen to go. Not required. Chosen. And she’d held the house.
Travel is only the visible version. The invisible one is happening in houses every week, in men who would never describe themselves as gone. The basement on a Saturday. The workout that was supposed to take an hour. The friends. The project. Physically in the house, attentionally somewhere else. I’ve done all of these. I still do some. The tax lands in the same place.
There’s a version of this story where I come back the hero. Father who does hard things. The one the boys will remember, faintly, as the man who didn’t sit around. Partly true. The suffering on the course was real. What I was modeling wasn’t nothing. And my wife was running the house alone so I could have it. The ultra is selfless in the story I tell myself and a withdrawal from her account in the ledger she was keeping. Both.
Quantity time is a gift to the kids. I believe that. It’s also a tax you pay so the person running the house alongside you doesn’t go broke. Quality is what you get to enjoy inside a system she maintained. The hours I was proud of, bedtimes and backyard catch and jokes at dinner, happened on ground she held for me while I was gone, or downstairs, or on the phone, or out.
Where are you physically present but attentionally gone, and who in your house is paying for it.