Dad, you were a hard worker. Impressively so. You were a manager at a paper plant, and with four kids at home, providing for us was no small thing. We rarely went without. Or at least if money was ever tight, you did a good job making sure we didn’t know it.
I can see the love in that now. I can.
But there was another side to all those hours you worked, and it’s the part you don’t seem to remember the same way I do. You think being gone all the time was a sacrifice you made for us. I think it was a choice. Maybe a choice you believed you had to make. But the sacrifice didn’t stay where you think it did.
Most mornings, around 5:30, I’d hear the garage door rumble open from my bedroom and know you were leaving. That sound was my goodbye to you.
If we were lucky, you’d be home around 7:30 for dinner. Plenty of nights you weren’t. Sometimes I’d already be in bed when I heard the microwave beep downstairs because Mom had left you a Pyrex dish of whatever we’d had hours earlier.
I knew you were home because I could hear you moving around. But that was about it. You were almost like a ghost passing through the house after the rest of us had already finished another day without you.
And the hardest part wasn’t that you missed things. It was that I didn’t know you.
Dad was this huge, important title in our house. But there wasn’t always much person attached to it for me. I knew where you worked. I knew you worked hard. I knew not to bother you if you’d had a long day.
But I didn’t know what made you laugh when you weren’t exhausted. I didn’t know what you worried about, or what you thought about things, or what stories you might’ve told if we’d had more time to sit around and talk.
Us kids have talked about this as adults. How strangely empty the house could feel even though there were so many of us in it. We had you. We didn’t get very much access to the man behind Dad.
I know you were there for the big things when you could be. I’m not saying you never showed up.
But the in-between is where a kid learns who their father is. The weeknight when nothing important happened. The ride to practice where the radio was on and nobody talked, and it was still time together.
Most of our in-between was Mom. She was the one at the table. She was the one who heard about the day. You got the summary later, if you got one at all.
Now, when you talk about those years, I realize we remember them very differently. You didn’t retire until I was already in my thirties, so work took up most of the years when we were becoming people.
And now that you have more time, work is still one of the main things you talk about. You tell stories from the plant and smile. You describe the guys you worked with, the problems you solved, the shifts over the years. You say you sacrificed so much for us and you’d do it all again.
That’s the part I never know how to answer.
Because I understand what you mean. You gave your time, your energy, probably a lot of your body, to make sure we were taken care of.
But from where I was standing, you also chose work over being there. Again and again. Maybe some of those choices were impossible. Maybe money was that tight.
But when you call all of it a sacrifice, it sounds like nobody else paid for it. And we did, Dad. We paid for it in your empty chair and your closed eyes on the couch and the version of you we only got at the very end of the day when there was almost nothing left.
And you were able to make that choice because Mom was there carrying everything you weren’t. Four kids, dinner, school, appointments, rides, problems, birthdays, all of it. She never sat us down and complained about you. She never made your job the villain. She handled what needed handling, every single day, without asking anyone to notice.
Looking back, I realize she was doing two parents’ worth of work so that you could do one parent’s worth of earning. I don’t think she’d describe it that way. But from where the four of us were sitting, that’s what it looked like.
Your sixty-hour weeks were only possible because she absorbed the rest of life. You could stay late because she was home. You could miss dinner because she made it. You could be the provider because she was doing every other kind of providing.
Sometimes I wonder what you would’ve done if she hadn’t been there to pick up every piece your job made you put down.
The part I struggle with is that I don’t want to hurt you with any of this. You’re older now. I know the world you came from told men that providing was loving, that being exhausted from work was proof you were doing right by your family.
I can understand how you got there. I can understand it and still wish you had made different choices. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
I can be grateful the lights stayed on and still wish you’d been at the dinner table. I can know you loved us and still admit that I didn’t get enough of you.
And I know I’m looking backward with information you didn’t have then. Maybe leaving that job wasn’t realistic. Maybe fewer hours did mean fewer groceries, less security, less of the life we had.
I don’t want to pretend your choices were easy. You were doing what the men around you did, and they were doing what their fathers did, and nobody stopped to ask whether it was working for the people at home.
But necessity and impact are two different things, Dad. A choice can make sense and still hurt the people living around it.
I probably won’t ever say all of this to you exactly this way. When you tell me you sacrificed everything for us, I usually let you have that. Maybe you need it. Maybe after everything you put in, you’ve earned the right to remember it the way that makes it worth it.
But when you think back on those years, I hope you understand that we remember them differently. You remember how much you gave us. I remember the garage door at 5:30 in the morning and the microwave beeping after I was already in bed.
You remember the work you did for us. I remember how much of you we didn’t get.
And I think if you could sit inside that memory for a minute, the one where your kid is lying in bed listening for the sound of you coming home, you might call it something other than sacrifice.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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