Dad's Working from Home

I'm making radical changes. I've been working from home for quite a few years and I've found that my connection with my children is not what I want it to be. At first working from home created a sense of closeness. Always home, my children naturally gravitated to me when school let out or they woke up.

Then I began to feel unproductive because of all the interruption and I cloistered myself away. Out of sight does not translate into out of mind with children, so I would close my door (an ineffective move), then I got to the point where I locked my office door when working.

The real issues manifested when I worked from sun up until after the children went to bed. Work became a constant albatross that not only hung around my neck, it greeted me in the morning and went to bed with me at night.

I recently came to my senses and realized I have outgrown my house. I need an office where I can do what I do, so that when I come home, I can focus of what is truly important - my family. Even this will be tough as I am a writer/publisher and my work tends to follow me wherever I go.

Since I committed to this new office, I have taken a lot more time to shoot hoops with my son, I just took a lengthy vacation with my four-year-old daughter and I've gone to the pool with the entire family about six times in two weeks. This is a dramatic change from the 'hermit' dad I had become.

This week's blog is an encouragement to fathers everywhere to separate from work and connect with your family. The time I've spent with my family this past month has been rewarding. I feel much more connected, relaxed and in tune with life. Work has stepped up and regained its "passion" status and even in a crazy economy, I feel I have everything I need - namely my wife and children.

If you work from home, make sure you step away from it and connect, not superficially, but one-on-one, as a group, in pairs, whatever it takes. Your work level will improve, your attitude will lighten up and life will be a joy!

Vacation's End

I must admit, I entered the first day of my 12 day vacation with my four-year-old daughter with a certain amount of trepidation. I just knew she would be clamoring for mommy or crying because she had no one to play with. After all, she would spend 12 days with me and Granny, and me and Granny like to talk.

What ended up happening was beautiful. Granny and Roni hit it off. Roni loved helping with the household chores. She especially loved dusting and watering the flowers. Inside, dusting on Tuesday ended up hilariously fun. Roni made sure Granny dusted everything with her. Nothing, and I mean nothing escaped her attention. All ceiling fans, door knobs and even backs of chairs got the Swiffer treatment.

Outside, watering the roses and day lilies were a thrill. Roni loved to help the plants grow and she made sure they each received a generous portion of water each day. Roni helped with dishes, cooking, cleaning, bed making - anything Granny had to do each day. I was able to sleep in each day (which I desperately needed to do because I stayed up too late each night).

In the airport on the way home, Roni took over the wheeled luggage while I walked through Atlanta International Airport with a pink suitcase that read, "I'm going to Grandma's!" Roni ended up being one of the greatest traveling partners I've ever had. Our relationship, which was already strong, became even closer. This was a trip to remember.

One day I'll look back and remember this vacation with a sad melancholy, but today, right now, I cherish the special time me and my daughter had together and the connection we have that grew stronger. Dads, heads up, you need to do this...

Vacation One-on-one With Your Four-year-old

I don't know when, where or why the idea stabbed my brain. I don't know if the decision to act on this insane idea even received the slightest pondering. My knowledge of the ramifications of this decision only reached my pea brain just before we boarded the jet at a dead run with less than five minutes to spare - I now traveled the Twilight Zone by way of a West Virginia vacation one-on-one with my lovely four-year-old daughter Veronica.

Roni defines the walking, talking sweet-princess girlie-girl that all parents dream of - she's polite, loves to dress well, self-sufficient beyond her meager years and ready with a smile that pales the sun. Wonderful attributes such as minimal pouting (if any) and an ability to charm anyone into loving her do not appear to make for a challenging vacation. Add into the mix that I wrote my first book - Fatherhood 101 - Bonding Tips for Building Loving Relationships the first eighteen months of her life by jotting down everything I did to bond with her.

Pretty tight describes our wonderful father-daughter relationship. All this oozes coolness. It oozes confidence. It oozes a comfort level many if not most fathers never know with their children. Unfortunately it also oozes fear that a) the work needed to be don on this 'working' vacation won't get done or b) Roni's feelings get hurt by her father's inattention while securing the tasks he needs to accomplish.

Roni's first plane ride sent the vacation into the stratosphere as she squealed with glee on take off, letting out a four-year-old's version of a rebel yell that caused the passenger in front of her to flinch. I smiled at my little girl and fought off the aforementioned fears.

Once at my mother's house, Granny took over little Roni's attention and covered for me while I met with high school classmates I had not seen in over thirty years. Also in town for the weekend, my sister and Roni bonded faster than Crazy Glue and again, my fears leapt into the flowing waters of family and newness and fun.

Then my sister left and I stared at ten days of me, Roni and Granny. Dumping my child off on someone else never enters my equation other than short breaks. While my sister interacted with Roni, I still played with her, took her to the park, climbed and swung and merry-go-rounded until dizziness and laughter ate us up. But my sister kept Roni from mentioning mom and three siblings left behind in Florida.

While Roni and I stay very close, mom remains extremely important to my littlest child. I know the day approaches when I must address the absence of mom and siblings and I do not look forward to the sad look that will crawl her face like devastating shadow.

I am blessed that Veronica loves to be a helper and that Granny distracts her with household chores. I file away for future reference that Roni loves to help Granny clean. Heck, she does the same thing at home with Mom. She truly strikes me as an exceptional child.

I do not want to let her down. I do not want this vacation to morph into anything but fun for her, yet work must get done. So far, Granny and I double team her well. At this moment she and Granny mixed up some mop water and currently work diligently on the kitchen floor.

I sit here keying this, reminding me of why I love writing so much. This is my work. My work does not always take me away from my children. In fact, as in this case, my work involves one of my children.

Hope returns as I key these words as I know Roni is with me because she can handle herself incredibly well for a four-year-old. She's telling Granny of a good idea - they can wash the car next - and I hear a brief hesitation in Granny's reply as she looks to divert a very sharp child from a more labor intensive chore.

I smile as I've done the same thing many times. Veronica does not miss me and I've been able to key two blogs. In fact, I can most likely get all my work done today at this rate and still make the day memorable to my little one.

Fathers need to step out and challenge their interaction with their children one-on-one. I hope my follow-up blog to this (which will post at the end of the month) will say that I was up to the task. That I was able to interact with my little girl and also work. That we will remember this little two week vacation for the rest of our lives.

I see confidence rising in my heart and hear focused interaction between Granny and Roni outside my door. Note to self - while a father should make sure he carries his own weight when caring for his children, there is a time and a place for others to step in and help. I'll be able to have more fun with Roni today since I will have completed the work I need to get done which will free me up to be more a four-year-old than fifty-one.

Going Home

Dads, remember that your children will one day feel this way:


You notice it more and more as time passes. You can't go home again. We try. When we leave the home of our youth for any significant time, it seems, upon our return, that everything changed overnight. This is nothing new. I've seen writers lament this very subject many times. Let's just say I need to write it myself, ok?


My sister and I just visited the family home. The house that's been in our family for at least 70 years, probably longer. Circumstances forced us to walk beside the house to the back yard. The fence on our left and the house on our right inexplicably stood drastically closer than when the two of us used to run around the house playing "red-light, green-light".


I know fences don't move, nor do houses, but some cosmic force narrowed that passageway so that we checked our steps so as to not get hung on the metal prongs of the fence.


Then there's the "dirt road" side of the house. While growing up with friends and a dog, grass rarely grew beside the house. Tonka earth-movers and dump trucks plowed the finely grained dirt and Match Box cars zoomed the new highways. Grass equaled invader and we often yanked roots as best we could so the offending foliage would be gone for life.


Now, the soft green carpet that blasphemes my eyes also amazes in that it actually looks appealing in a perverted kind of way. Its lushness invites my bare feet, something I would never do given their tenderfoot nature. Nature's carpet still appears as a toupee, an aberration, not the dirt construction zone of my youth.


Changes in the house, while disconcerting, do not possess quite the impact of the changes in exterior landscape. Trees, or actually the absence of trees, cause the most emotional trauma. We once corralled eight wonderful trees in our now-tiny-but-then-huge yard. Five Lomardi Poplars, a wonderful maple and two exquisite Chines Elms that bravely guarded the front of the house.


The Elms suffered death at the hands of the early seventies elms disease that eradicated this wonderful tree species. Those two trees commanded attention and shielded the small frame house from exposure of its limited size and plainness. The elms shaded the entire front lawn in summer and dripped luscious icicles in winter.


Now the house is exposed as a small box squished between two houses and is best described as nondescript despite some creative landscaping. This landscaping does lend the house a polished, tidy look, but without the elms, the house cannot live up to the standards of my youth.


I cannot at this time address the Lombardi's and the maple tree. I cried the day they cut down the rocket-shaped poplars. These soldiers stood guard over the back fence all the days of my early youth. The allowed grade-school aged friends to come over and look out over the entire town while breezes tugged at our clothes. We built forts that hid us in summer and protected us from the cold in winter. Now, their memory is as faded as forty-year-old blacktop.


Forty years since I last smelled those wonderful leaves. The autumn leaf piles taller than my parents that we once dove into with such glee now rotted into a plus green lawn that shows no wear and tear of dogs and children.


The changes devastate the heart. The longing for the days of army men battles and Tonka roadways threatens to overwhelm me - to send me into the abyss of sadness and melancholy. Work and responsibilities tug at my mind and tell me I can ill afford this emotional debilitation, but my heart longs for a tear, a healing drop of that part of me that needs closure and denies closure in one breath.


Going home often requires my heart to steel itself, to guard against the threat of emotional invasion, yet each and every trip, I fall prey to the ravages of time and I struggle not to weep over the loss of the vivid memories that fuel my melancholy. If I could only keep those memories sharp, at least I could wallow in the sadness to full effect. This thing of faded memories probably hurts most.


All that said, going home still touches my soul and too often in this world I get to feeling that my soul can no longer be reached. The sadness upon me now, I thank the writer's muse for the ability to touch that part of me no one ever sees...