Ten Days

The boys left for Colorado ten days ago. Camping with family. I stayed back for work.

I’ll be honest. Part of me was excited. Ten days to myself. Do whatever I want, whenever I want. Somewhere in the last five or six years, I think I’d been quietly waiting for a stretch exactly like this one. Time to become who I thought I was supposed to be. Never said it out loud. Just waited.

Then the ten days came.

Wake up. Go to work. Come home. Watch TV. Work late. Go to bed. Do it all over. Ten days straight.

Nothing changed for me.

That’s the part I keep sitting with. Nothing changed. I thought the freedom would do something on its own. It didn’t. I even had my nights for the passion projects, the ones I never get to. It just got quiet. Then it got lonely. Then I missed my wife more than I expected to, and I missed my boys so much I didn’t know where to put it.

There were years, the dark ones, when a thought used to come through. If only I didn’t have to be a dad today. That is a hard sentence to leave on the page. But it was real, and it turns out it wasn’t the end of anything.

Because the ten days answered it. I had been carrying the idea that the life I wanted was somewhere past all of this. Past the responsibility. Past the noise. I finally got to the other side of it, and the life I was looking for wasn’t there. It was back home. In the noise I had been half-resenting the whole time.

I don’t think I have this all the way figured out. I probably don’t. But I got exactly what I asked for, and it wasn’t what I wanted, and I am grateful in a way I can’t totally explain. Some things you don’t get to be told. You have to be handed the empty version and sit in it a while.

They come home today. I can’t wait.

This morning I told my therapist about the ten days. About how nothing changed. We usually meet in person. Today we needed to meet virtually, from the house.

He has a couple of names for the thing that kept promising me the freedom would fix it. The thief. The ego. Not my family. Not the job. The quiet story that kept telling me my real life was waiting somewhere on the other side of everything I’m responsible for. That if I could just get free of it for a while, I’d finally turn into whoever I was supposed to be.

The story isn’t all the way a lie. That’s what makes it hard to catch. I did need rest. I did need to heal. It kept pointing me away from the exact place the life already was.

The ten days let the story finish its sentence. It got everything it had been asking for. And then it went quiet, because there was nothing left for it to promise.

The whole time we talked, Chancelor was yelling through the wall about his little brother staying out of his room. Loud enough my therapist could hear him. There was a time I would have heard that as one more thing being asked of me. This morning I just let it go on.