It had to end sometime.
This ride in the clouds I’ve been living for the last few weeks has been incredible.
Especially when you consider where my life was taking me just before that.
Here I am with a new job, a new city and a new outlook.
Well if it sounds like I am setting this up for a big negative bombshell, I am not.
This is a no bombshell zone.
My life is still good and I am still in a great place -- physically and emotionally.
But I am definitely not in the same place I was just a few days ago.
Approaching the end of my second week, my job is becoming... a job.
Life in my little bachelor pad has gone from cool... to empty.
And yesterday, thanks to a broken elevator, I had to walk up to the 17th floor of a building.
Ok, that last part, while very true, was only temporary.
But the piece of this puzzle that is probably hitting me the hardest is the reality that my family is not here.
And they won’t be anytime soon.
Sure, we still skype.
In fact, I just got off the computer with them.
But even that had a different tone tonight.
I started off with my 13-year old daughter, but after a few quick minutes, she had to go to do homework, shower and get to bed.
By my calculations, that would place me no better than 4th on her to do list.
Then came my six-year old daughter.
We talked about her upcoming soccer season and her new adventure with a local choir.
Then she was telling me about how things are going in school when all of a sudden...
... she started crying.
Full crocodile tears.
Midway through a sentence.
For no apparent reason.
“I miss you dad.”
I’m not sure exactly what set her emotions in motion, but those emotions represented exactly what I’ve been feeling.
“I miss you too,” I said, somehow holding back my tears.
Here’s where it had a chance to go downhill very quickly.
But fortunately I remembered an old yiddish adage just in the nick of time:
- when you are skyping with your six-year old child and they start crying uncontrollably because their father is on the other side of the country trying to restart his life and give his family a better one, the father needs to start making funny faces and funny noises as quickly as possible to distract the child from the reason that they are crying.
It’s a lot funnier in yiddish.
But for at least this night, it worked.
I put my face as close to the camera as possible, which ignited her giggling.
That, plus a loud burp (or two) and we were good to go.
Just at that time, my wife came in and sent the six-year old to bed.
I’m guessing this will not be the end of her sadness, but the good news is I have a lot more burps still left in me.
Now it was time for my son, the 11-year old boy living in a house full of females.
Even the dog is a girl.
Well normally he would come on the skype line and we’d talk about boy things.
Like the baseball season. And football season. And basketball season.
And burping.
And if we had thirty seconds left, we could talk about school too.
Well, this time my son didn’t come on the line.
That’s because he’s not there.
He left today on a three-day trip with his sixth grade class.
The same type of trip I’ve gone on for the last two years with my daughter’s class.
Before this little job thing popped up, I was scheduled to be there with him too.
But that all changed.
Bright and early this morning, I called my son to wish him a great trip.
He sounded excited. Almost very excited.
But I could tell from his voice (and my wife’s first hand observation) that he was a little scared.
And disappointed.
This was going to be his big trip with dad.
Just like his sister had.
Twice.
But dad is not there anymore.
And now my son is flying solo.
And he doesn’t like it.
And neither do I.
I’m sure by the time that school bus got to its destination, he’ll be plenty nauseous and he’ll forget all about me.
And that’s what I’m scared of.
Out of sight, out of mind.
We knew this was going to be the hard part.
And this is just week two.
What makes me sad is knowing that I am making them sad.
And that's enough to make any grown man cry.
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