Time is one of the great mysteries of childhood. When I was small and would ask my mother when we might play a game together, she would respond in one of two ways. After while was my preferred answer, as it somehow seemed a short time to wait. Later , on the other hand, was bad. It loomed dark and sinister in my imagination, a word that meant my mother would not get to me for a very long time. Neither response was tied to any measurable time span, of course. My mother answered my nagging with the same casual distractedness that I display to my son. ‘When can we play Trouble?’ he asks as I bathe the baby, and as if on automatic pilot I answer, ‘In awhile.’ I might as well just say ‘in about three weeks.’ It’s all the same to the 5-year-old. For my son, time exists as a mile-wide ocean between now and what he wants: his birthday, Christmas, our next ski trip. Every Thursday he stays after school for gymnastics, his favorite part of the week. On Monday, he’ll ask, ‘When’s gymnastics?’ and I’ll tell him ‘Three more days.’ ‘Tomorrow?’ he’ll ask. ‘No,’ I’ll respond. ‘Three more tomorrows, then it will be gym day.’ ‘You mean the day after tomorrow?’ ‘No,’ I’ll say. ‘The day after tomorrow and then another wake-up after that.’ It’s maddening, really. This is why time-out is such an effective discipline tool. To a small child, two minutes feels the same as two hours.

My husband spent a week away on a business trip recently. How do you explain a week without Dad to a boy who resists brushing his teeth because it takes too long• ‘Seven wake-ups,’ we told him as my husband packed his bag that morning. ‘Will you be back tomorrow?’ the boy asked, frantic with hope. As the airport limousine pulled out of the driveway, my son climbed onto the kitchen counter to look out the window. He banged on the glass with teary hands, trying to get his dad to wave. ‘He didn’t see me,’ my son cried. Then, he collapsed into a moist, red heap, pleading for specifics . ‘How long is a week?’ he demanded. Daddy would be away for one playdate with Matthew, seven baths, one basketball practice, seven viewings of ‘The Wild Thornberrys,’ I told him. When you wake up the day of basketball practice, it will almost be time for him to come home. It was the best I could do. He trudged into school that day with a framed family snapshot clutched to his chest. His teacher says he announced his father’s departure to the class, using words like ‘precious’ and ‘broken heart.’ As far as my boy was concerned, his father was not coming back. To him, a week is not a finite, neat unit of time. It is a puzzling abyss into which fall birthdays and Christmas. And dads. We tried to span the gap with frequent phone calls, including several from the airplane. Each time they spoke, my son would grill his father with questions about his return: Soon• How soon• Tomorrow• When’s Sunday• It was as if my son was wandering alone in a dark forest without benefit of a bread crumb trail. He had no sense of how long he had been walking, or how much longer he would have to go before reaching the bright light of a reunion. It’s always hard when my husband travels – hard for all of us. But this last trip was the worst for our son. He’s in that tricky wedge of childhood when he’s old enough to really miss his dad, but not mature enough to pace himself through seven days of melancholy. Television’s ‘Mister Rogers’ once told the story of a little girl who was undergoing treatment for cancer. The child worried how long she would have to be inside a radiation tunnel. ‘As long as it takes to sing ‘A Beautiful Day in this Neighborhood,’ Mister Rogers’ theme song,’ her mother told her. The child said she could stand anything for that long. I’m looking for something as brilliant to reassure my boy. We could cross off days on the calendar, but he has already tried crossing off two blocks at once, hoping to speed things along. As the week wore on, and the questions persisted, I simplified my answers. ‘Daddy will be home pretty soon,’ I would say. Or, ‘It won’t be long now.’ Or, finally, this: ‘He’s coming tomorrow.’ I was just hanging on until I could say, ‘Later,’ and mean it. Still, I know such phrases mean nothing to our heartsick boy. Until the man walks through the door, they’re all just empty promises. Beth Dolinar is a former investigative reporter for WTAE-TV who now stays home to raise her son and daughter. She and her husband live in Ben Avon and Connecticut. She can be contacted at cootiej@aol.com .

---

Copyright ©2026— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)

---