Feeling Guilty About How Much Time I’m Away From My Kid: Real Tips That Actually Work
I’m fumbling with my ID and boarding pass at Atlanta airport security, my phone tucked between my shoulder and chin, and my 4-year-old is wailing so loud the TSA agent glances over at me. “He wants the T-Rex sticker you left on your laptop,” my mom says, her voice raised over the screaming. “It’s okay, buddy, we’ll get a new one tomorrow.” But he’s inconsolable, and I’m two seconds from crying right there in the line, because that sticker is the third thing I’ve forgotten this trip, and how can I be his mom if I can’t even keep track of his favorite sticker when I leave? I board the flight, scroll through my Instagram feed for 20 minutes, and see a friend’s post of her making homemade playdough with her kids that morning, and the guilt settles heavy in my stomach, the way it always does when I’m away.
I travel two, sometimes three times a month for my job in brand marketing. On average, I’m gone 8 to 10 nights a month. Some weeks, I see my son for breakfast three days in a row, that’s it. For the first two years of this schedule, I dealt with the guilt by overcompensating. Every trip, I came home with a new toy, usually something big I didn’t need to buy. When I was home, I said yes to everything: extra screen time, extra cookies, skipping my own plans to sit and play dinosaurs even when I was exhausted. I’d hover when I picked him up after a trip, peppering him with questions: “Did you miss me? Are you mad I left? Did you have fun without me?” I was so busy trying to fix the damage I thought I was doing that I could barely just be with him.
The parent-teacher conference last October changed that. Ms. Rita, his preschool teacher, has been doing this for 28 years, and she doesn’t do the fake “you’re doing great” small talk. When I brought up my guilt, mid-conversation about his occasional separation anxiety at drop-off, I just spilled everything. “I know I’m gone too much,” I said, twisting my water bottle cap in my lap. “He’s going to end up with all these issues because I’m never here, right?”
Ms. Rita leaned back in her chair and blinked at me for a second. Then she said, “Let me ask you something. When you’re home after a trip, do you ever let him just be? Do you let him keep playing with his blocks if that’s what he’s in the middle of, or do you scoop him up immediately to make up for lost time?” I thought about the last time I’d come home. He’d been building a block tower with my husband, and I’d walked in, dropped my bags, and pulled him away to hug him and show him the new Lego set I’d bought. He’d cried because I knocked over his tower. I’d thought he was upset I was gone, not that I’d ruined his project.
Ms. Rita said what I’ve since learned is true: Kids don’t measure love in hours. They measure it in reliability. The problem isn’t that you’re gone. The problem is that your guilt makes you act all weird when you’re home, and that’s what makes him uneasy. He picks up on how anxious you are about leaving, so he gets anxious too. That clicked for me. I started testing small, low-effort changes, no big overhauls, because I don’t have time for big overhauls.
First, I stopped bringing home a new toy every trip. Instead, I pick up one plain rock from wherever I am—from the hotel garden, from the side of the highway, from the park near the office I’m visiting. I write the city on the bottom with a sharpie, and that’s it. He has a jar on his windowsill full of them now, and he’ll dump them out and tell me which one is his favorite every Sunday. It costs nothing, and it means more than any $30 dinosaur toy ever did.
Second, I leave one 60-second voice note for him every day I’m gone, that he listens to while he eats his morning oatmeal. I don’t do a 20-minute phone call in the middle of the day, because that usually interrupts his play or his nap, and it just ends up with him getting upset I can’t come home right then. The voice note is always something small: “I saw a golden retriever today that was bigger than our couch, it made me think of your big stuffed bear. Can you draw me a picture of it to show me when I get home?” That’s it. It’s consistent, it’s small, and he knows it’s coming every day we’re apart.
Third, when I walk in the door after a trip, I don’t rush to him. I put my bags down by the door, wash my hands, and let him come to me. If he’s mid-play, I just sit down nearby and do my own thing—fold laundry, answer a couple quick work emails, drink a soda. Last time I came home from a trip to Chicago, he was playing dinosaur park with his cousin, and he just waved at me from the living room rug and said “hi mommy” and went back to digging. Twenty minutes later, he climbed into my lap to show me a new roar he’d learned, and we sat there for 10 minutes just roaring at each other. That’s way better than the old days where I’d interrupt his play to force a hug, and we’d both end up frustrated.
I still feel guilty sometimes. Last month, I missed his first soccer class because my flight got delayed, and I sat in the Detroit airport crying for 20 minutes because I thought I’d ruined his whole week. But when I got home the next day, he told me he got an orange popsicle after class with his dad, and it was the best day ever. The guilt doesn’t just go away, not completely. I think it’s something that sticks with you when you have to be away more than you want to be.
But what I know now is that it doesn’t have to run your life. You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be consistent. The small stuff adds up way more than big grand gestures to make up for lost time. Last week, before I left for a trip, he hugged me, had a little tear, and said “bring me a gray rock, okay?” I said I would, and I reminded him about the voice note in the morning, and he ran off to play with his grandma. I still had that little twinge in my chest when I drove to the airport. But it didn’t weigh me down the way it used to. Some days, that’s the best you can get.
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