Hardest decision in life1/21/2024 ![]() Your phone delivers a panicked summons your heart thrums with love for your child you stand up and you run. ![]() I would not have believed it at the time, but these are the easy calls. I cried myself to sleep that night in Baghdad. How fast can I get there? “The day after tomorrow” would have been the accurate response, but the line mercifully went dead before I had to deliver it. She wants to tell me that my son-the other one, Alexander, then 4 years old-is sick. It’s the school nurse back in Washington. We’re all suited up in body armor and helmets, and we’re being herded toward Black Hawk helicopters that will fly us to the next press conference when my cellphone rings. I’m in Baghdad, part of the Pentagon press pool covering a visit by the U.S. But when a text rolls in from the babysitter and it begins, “We’re in the emergency room …,” you stand up and you run.Īnother moment: Iraq, 2009. I have pushed back from the anchor chair in Studio 31, NPR’s main studio, in the middle of a live broadcast and announced to my co-host and to the startled director, “I’ve got to go.” One cannot get away with this often. When the job and the kids collide, the kids come first. Most of the working mothers I know have made a pact with themselves. You blink and the finish line is in sight. Sister, I’ve been there.īut here is the thing I did not know: The tug is just as strong when your baby is 17 as when he is seven weeks or seven months. And they’re missing it, and it’s only a damn banana, but they’ll never get that moment back. Tome after tome offers encouragement and advice for new moms drowning in hormones and guilt in their office cubicles, because their phones have lit up with a picture from day care or the nanny, of their kid happily eating his first banana. Start reading, though, and you’ll find they’re nearly all aimed at young parents at the beginning of the whole enterprise. I swear there are a million well-meaning books about the juggle, and work-life balance, and leaning in and leaning out, and how you can have it all just maybe not all at once. Ninth grade slides into 10th slides into 11th. That next time, I’d figure out a way to be there, deadlines be damned, screaming myself hoarse on the sidelines.Įxcept that the years slip by. ![]() I was … not so okay with this, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that there would always be another game. His dad attended every game he could the other parents cheered James on he came home and gave me the play-by-play at dinner. James was, actually, mostly okay with this. Technology makes possible many once-impossible things, but our broadcast engineers have yet to figure out how I might anchor a daily national news program from the bleachers. This article is adapted from Kelly’s forthcoming book. Want to know what else happens on weekdays at 4 p.m.? NPR’s All Things Considered goes on air. ![]() Varsity games tend to happen on weekdays, around 4 p.m. Game time arrives and the whistle blows and James plays his heart out.Īt least, for a long time, this was what I had been told. 7-all washed and arranged at right angles at the foot of his bed. Cleats, shin guards, cherished jersey-No. This same boy clears a space in the debris to carefully lay out his uniform the night before a game. This is a boy so catastrophically, irredeemably messy that even his younger brother, also a teenager, gets grossed out by the chaos. He’s a starting striker on his high-school varsity team. Barely able to walk and already learning to dribble. There’s a photo of him, age 1-1!-tiny soccer ball at his feet and huge grin on his face. This child, whose name is James, loves soccer. The time left that the four of us will live together, under this roof, intact as a family. I’m counting the time left before my oldest child leaves home.
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