I travel a lot for work. Two weeks out of every month, a few days each trip. It’s not constant but it’s consistent, and I know my kids feel it. I know they come home a little off when I’ve been gone. I know they need more from me when I get back. I’ve built in mommy-me dates for exactly that reason — one on one time, intentional reconnection, making sure they know they’re not competing for me.
I thought I had a system. I thought I was managing it.
And then I came home and went through the stack of school artwork.
Parents, you know the stack. It is relentless and it is beautiful and occasionally it is a line of color on a page that the teacher has mounted on construction paper like a masterpiece and you love it because your kid made it. I was going through the pile and I found a page where they’d been practicing letters — T and F, if you’re curious — and at the bottom there was a feelings exercise. Draw how you feel. Write what you’re feeling.
My son drew a sad face. Wearing a hat. And next to it, where the teacher had asked him to explain, he had written:
I feel sad because I miss Mom.
I canceled my next trip.
I’m not saying that’s the right call for every parent in every situation. I’m not saying the career doesn’t matter or that I don’t have obligations. I know all of that. But I looked at those words in my kid’s handwriting on a piece of school paper and something very clear happened in my chest and the decision was not complicated.
I told my boss I needed a couple of weeks at home. I work for a company that gives me enough flexibility to move things around when I really need to and I used that flexibility without guilt. Some trips I can’t get out of. This wasn’t one of them.
He doesn’t say I miss you when I leave. He doesn’t have a big dramatic goodbye. He just goes about his morning. And I go about mine thinking he’s fine, thinking the system is working, thinking the mommy-me dates are covering it.
And then a feelings worksheet tells me the truth.
I know they feel it more than they show me. I’ve always known that on some level. But seeing it written down in pencil on a piece of school paper — four words in a five-year-old’s handwriting — is a different thing entirely.
Home for a couple of weeks. That’s where I need to be right now.
Has your kid ever said or done something that stopped you completely and made you reprioritize without a second thought? Drop it in the comments.
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