Quiet Progress

This week, I traveled for work for the first time in a long time, and somewhere on the way home, it dawned on me:

Eli never called me crying.

Not once.

He didn’t call me 85 times asking when I was coming home. He didn’t need to know exactly where I was, what I was doing, when my flight left, when my flight landed, and how many sleeps were left until I walked back through the door.

Actually, I barely heard from him at all.

And the strangest part?

I didn’t even notice until the trip was over.

For years, work travel required an entire operation before I ever zipped my suitcase.
I used to travel about 25% of the time, which meant roughly one week out of every four, I was preparing my family for me to leave.

And when I say preparing, I do not mean, Hey guys, there’s frozen pizza in the garage freezer. Good luck. Oh no. I mean preparing.

I would prep lunches.

Make dinners that just needed reheating.

Wash every single article of clothing in the house and put it away.

Lay out school clothes.

Organize medications.

Make sure homework was done—or at least clearly identified, labeled, highlighted, probably placed somewhere impossible to miss.

If there was a project coming up, I made sure everyone knew about it.

I cleaned the house from top to bottom because apparently, in my mind, leaving town with a dirty 
bathroom would have been an act of abandonment.

Basically, I tried to eliminate every possible inconvenience my absence could create before I ever left.

And it wasn’t because I didn’t trust my husband to take care of our kids.

I did.

It was because somewhere along the way I decided that if I was inconveniencing everyone by leaving, the least I could do was make my absence as painless as possible.

Work required me to travel.

So I would compensate.

I would do three days of work before leaving to go do three more days of work.

Totally logical. RIGHT?

And then there was Eli.

Leaving was hard for him. Really hard.

He needed reassurance over and over and over again.

When are you coming home?
Where are you?
Are you at the hotel?
What time are you going to bed?
When is your flight?
How many more days?

Sometimes he would call crying in the middle of the night because he missed me.
Sometimes I would finally get him settled, hang up, and then stare at the ceiling of some hotel room knowing there was a very good chance my phone would ring again.

I will never forget one particular trip. I had several different work legs that started in Boston and ended in Minneapolis. From there, I headed to Mexico to meet Husband for a couple of days on a work trip of his, and then we headed home together.

There were two nights on that trip with nonstop calls.

My last night in Minneapolis was also Husband’s last night home with the boys before he left for Mexico. I’m sure it was some combination of me already having been gone for a week and Husband preparing to leave, but I know for certain that Eli did not sleep that night.

I know this because he called me every single hour from midnight until 6 a.m.

The next night?

Same thing.

Husband snoozed through both all-nighters…. once, lying right next to Eli while he made those calls, and once right next to me while I received them… I’m not salty… promise! 🤪

Even when I was physically somewhere else, a pretty significant part of me was still managing things at home.

So this week, when I packed my suitcase and left for work, I didn’t do any of that.

Now, obviously, life looks very different these days.

My boys are older.

They can dress themselves.
They can feed themselves.
They are perfectly capable of locating clean underwear without me arranging it in chronological order.

Mostly.

I didn’t meal prep.
I didn’t lay anything out.

I did still clean the entire house like the President was coming over while I was gone and made sure all the laundry was cleaned, pressed/folded, and put away… but, like—who doesn’t do that?!

I packed my bag and I left.

And then I worked.

That was it.

At night, I went back to my hotel room and slept.

Through the night.

One night, I went to dinner with a dear friend who lived in the city where I was working—and not a single call during dinner!

I wasn’t sitting there waiting for my phone to ring.
I wasn’t checking the time and wondering whether Eli was okay.
I wasn’t trying to manage home from another state.

I was just…there.

Doing the job I had traveled there to do.

And I enjoyed it.

That realization caught me a little off guard.

Because there was no big moment when things changed.

There wasn’t a day when Eli announced, Mother, I have developed sufficient coping skills and no longer require hourly confirmation of your return.

There was no ceremony.
No milestone marked on the calendar.

It just happened quietly.

Except, I guess, it didn’t just happen.

Somewhere between those hotel-room phone calls years ago and this trip, Eli has done a tremendous amount of work.

Years of therapy.
Years of ABA.
Years of practicing flexibility, tolerating changes in routine, learning how to manage anxiety, communicating what he needs, and figuring out what to do when something feels uncomfortable instead of immediately needing me to make the uncomfortable feeling go away.

Those therapy goals can feel so small when you’re in the middle of them.

Tolerate this for five minutes.
Wait without asking again.
Use your words.
Practice the change in routine.
Work through the feeling.
Try again.

They don’t exactly feel life-changing when you’re checking them off one tiny skill at a time.

But then, every once in a while, you get to see what all of those tiny skills have been building toward.

A kid who once needed to call his mom crying in the middle of the night can now know she’s a few states away and still feel safe.

A kid who needed constant reassurance can trust what he’s been told.

And instead of spending the week focused on when I was coming home, he was out living his own life.

One afternoon after school, he went over to my mom’s house and made homemade dog treats with her.

Then he called me—not because he was upset, not because he needed reassurance, not because he needed to know how many more sleeps until I came home.

He called because he wanted to tell me all about the dog treats.

And I don’t think I fully appreciated what a big deal that was in the moment.

The call wasn’t about needing me.

It was about sharing something with me.

That feels like such a small distinction.

For us, it isn’t.

**Mom leaves.
And Mom comes back.**

That’s the thing about so much of the work we’ve done through ABA.

The wins aren’t usually huge, dramatic moments.

They’re often things other families probably wouldn’t even notice.

Sometimes, honestly, I don’t notice them.

Until suddenly I do.
Until I’m sitting on an airplane headed home from a work trip and realize my phone barely rang.
Until I realize I slept through the night.
Until I remember the one call I did get was from an excited kid telling me he’d made dog treats with his Noni.
Until I realize that something that once dictated how our entire family operated…didn’t anymore.

And that’s when all those little therapy goals don’t feel so little.

His world got a little bigger.
His ability to handle me being away got stronger.

And the years of work we’ve asked him to do showed up, once again, in the most wonderfully ordinary way possible:

Nothing happened.

He was okay.

Maybe I learned something, too.

I don’t have to make myself indispensable before I’m allowed to leave.
I don’t have to earn the right to travel for work by making sure nobody experiences a single inconvenience while I’m gone.

My family can miss me and still be okay.
Things can be imperfect at home and still be okay.
Dinner can be whatever they figure out.
Laundry can stay in the hamper for a couple extra days.

And apparently, everyone will survive if I leave town without personally engineering every detail of their week.

Who knew?

There is something bittersweet about realizing your kids need you differently than they once did.

But mostly, this one feels good.

Because years ago, I would have dreamed about taking a work trip where I could simply focus on my work, sleep through the night, and know everything at home was fine.

This week, I did exactly that.

And I didn’t even realize how far we had come until I was already on my way home.

Susan

A Nickel for the Jar: Sometimes the biggest evidence of growth is the quiet. No crisis. No tears. No 85 phone calls. Maybe just one call about homemade dog treats—and a kid quietly using all those little skills he worked so hard to learn.