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Its all true

Posted on August 13, 2004November 18, 2019 by Paul Armstrong

The effects of hurricane Charley are making the kids quite unhappy. Right outside the numerous windows of the house they see the beckoning, crystal blue pool (unlike our home, which outside our one back window you can see weeds, random grasses and some dirt). But it’s raining and cool, and even a heated pool can’t make the gray pleasant. And I have to work. Have to…

I don’t want to and so many things (like writing this) keep me from being knee-deep in code files and things I wish to escape for just a little while.

In a few short weeks Abigail will be attending her first kindergarten class. I hate the cliché that “they grow up so fast”, and it’s only in part true. Time has so many varying degrees of revolution, but I hardly can believe that she’s 5, leaving for 5 days a week, and will continue now to do so for 13 years.

Being that I work at home, the absence will be much more noticeable. So often I was curt, as her blue eyes peered through the door to ask if I could turn on the light in her room. Too often said “just a minute” as she asked me to come downstairs for lunch. So selfish and absorbed in a deadline or focused on this or that trivial task, that I would ask her to leave, “close the door”, “I’m busy”.

The time is lost and I have just 2 weeks to hope that she now will come to trouble me for some of my time. Now nearly too late I am remiss to think how later in life she might think how I was never available, working all the time.

I know it’s not fully true, but no less my duty as a father isn’t just providing financially, but providing emotionally, through relationships. And nagging deep inside me is, I don’t want to be my father — driven to provide, but fatally distant. A man to whom I just wanted to be around, to see me, to love me beyond providing me with “things”.

I know am I not that, but I understand how easy it is to become that. Things provide comfort, but not security. Relationships fulfill eternally.

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