The thing we forgot to protect

After leaving ministry, I still had work to do. I still had a family. There were ordinary responsibilities, and none of them had received a letter explaining that I was going through something.

But a particular kind of noise had stopped.

For years I had known who I was by who needed me. A request could organise a day, interrupt a meal, give an otherwise uncertain hour its purpose. Being useful was more than something I enjoyed. It helped me recognise myself. Then the old recognition began to fail, and in the space it left I could hear things I had managed, for a long time, to keep beneath the work.

Grief, for one.

Also relief. I was less prepared for the relief. It seemed disloyal to feel it alongside the sadness, as though something I had loved could only have mattered if losing it hurt in every possible way. I did not yet know how to say that I missed parts of a life I could no longer keep living.

I had language for serving. I had language for sacrifice. I could speak about calling with the confidence of someone who had spent years arranging his life around it. When it came to stopping, my vocabulary was poor.

I called it laziness before I could call it need.

The change did not make me wise overnight. I would like to be able to offer that version. It would save us both some time. A man works too hard, something gives way, the man sees the error of his ways and goes home to become wonderfully available to his children. He buys a notebook. He takes up silence. His life acquires a tasteful amount of linen.

Mine did not.

I remained a person with ambition, unfinished work, people I loved and a talent for turning almost anything into an obligation. Even the decision to recover could become another task at which I hoped to excel. I could feel guilty about resting and then feel guilty about not being very good at rest. There is considerable administrative work involved in being that hard on yourself.

What began to change me was smaller than a revelation.

Sometimes it was running beside the sea. Sometimes it was sitting with Daniel. Sometimes Elizabeth would place her hand on my cheek and, for a moment, the whole complicated business of being somebody became less interesting than being her father.

I do not mean that my children healed me. That is too much to ask of a child, even inside a beautiful sentence. They had their own lives to be getting on with. They were allowed to need things, to be inconvenient, to be absorbed in something that had nothing to do with their dad. What changed was my capacity to meet them there. I began to recognise how often I had been physically close and still difficult to reach.

There were no sinister intentions in that absence. I loved them. I loved my family while I was hurried, while I was distracted, while I was convincing myself that one more piece of work would finally make room for us.

Love was present.

Time kept getting promised to it.

This book grows out of the awkward distance between those two things.