The Torch We Pass

There's a smallholding in Vanderbijlpark still vivid in my memory — not beautiful in the way postcards make rural things beautiful, but small and quiet and alone. I can see it clearly: my brother and me, home after school, the light fading fast because winter swallows the day early. Mama at the Holiday Inn, giving her hours to strangers' holidays whilst her own children were becoming strangers to her. Papa stopping at the German Club on the way home, the amber lights of the bar more welcoming than the dark house where we waited.

I remember the ache of it — not dramatic, not abusive, just the slow knowledge that settling down beside me with homework or a question or simply being there wasn't something parents did. Love looked like provision from a distance. Presence felt like a luxury no one could afford.

We learned young that we were inconvenient to our own parents' lives.

I'm fifty-six now. I can still taste the bitterness of that lesson. The trouble is, I taught it to my sons.

Jesse was seven. Every afternoon when we picked up his little brother from the daymother's house, Jesse would ask if he could stay to play with her children. My hands were full of work I'd brought home. My mind was already three emails ahead. My presence was here, in body, but the homework was on my lap, not his question in my heart.

I asked him once — and I can still hear the weight of my own confusion in the question — "Why don't you want to come home with me?"

His answer was a knife: "Because you're always working."

A seven-year-old. Naming it. No softness. No excuse. Just the plain, terrible truth of what he saw.

I had become what my parents were: a person who provided security but stole presence. I had taught Jesse the same lesson Vanderbijlpark taught me — that Mama's love means she's always somewhere else, doing something more important than you.

And I was passing that torch to my sons.

Here's what I know now, two decades later: overtime is a planning failure. Not sacrifice. Not devotion. Not the cost of being responsible. A planning failure. The fruit of poor boundaries, unrealistic timelines, a fear of saying no. Most cultures dress it up as virtue — we call it dedication, commitment, love — when really it's the evidence that something has broken in how we decide what matters.

I wasn't serving my family by working late. I was stealing from them. And I was teaching them that this theft was normal. That presence was a luxury. That they were inconvenient to my real work.

"Can a mother forget her nursing child, and have no compassion on the son of her womb?" The prophet Isaiah writes it as though it's unthinkable. Yet so many of us were raised by mothers and fathers who didn't forget us, exactly, but who were absent in the ways that matter most. Absent from the presence that shapes a child's sense of being seen, being delighted in, being worth staying for.

No email is worth a childhood. The inbox will refill itself no matter how faithfully you empty it. But a child's small window of wanting you close — of needing you close — that doesn't come round again. Not in the same way. Not with the same desperation, the same innocence, the same ache.

That's not poetic. That's not negotiable. That's the truth underneath everything else.

We spend our adult lives trying to fill what we didn't receive: the ache of not having been heard. Not having been seen. Not having been valued for our most basic human need: to matter to the people who made us. We medicate it with scrolling and working and reaching for one more thing, one more achievement, one more email at midnight. We call it ambition. We call it responsibility. We call it love.

The addiction is rarely the real problem. It's the smoke. The fire is the ache of not having been seen when it mattered most.

And I was teaching my sons to build their lives on the same foundation of absence that I did.

When Jesse spoke those words — "Because you're always working" — something broke. Not instantly. Not without cost. There were conversations with Clive, tears I won't detail here, hard choices about what work actually needed to come home and what was just habit, just proving something, just fear.

Two decades later, I'm still learning to put the laptop down when my boys come close because they need presence.

Two decades. Still unlearning what Vanderbijlpark taught me. Still choosing, over and over, to close the screen and be here. Still watching my children grieve my absence and deciding — finally, again, always — that no email is worth that.

The gospel doesn't shame us for the emptiness. God goes looking for the child still hiding in it. He comes not with judgement but with a tenderness that moves me to tears. "God sets the lonely in families." "He found him in a desert land and in the howling waste of the wilderness; He encircled him, He cared for him, He kept him as the apple of His eye."

The God who sees us. The God who stays. The God whose presence is so steadfast that even when a mother forgets, He does not forget.

That's what breaks the cycle. Not more programs. Not therapeutic language. Not grace that softens the accountability. It's the ruthless, tender love of a Father who comes looking for what was scattered, who gathers up the broken pieces, who says to the lonely child — inside us and around us — "I see you. I'm not leaving."

And then — if we're brave enough to receive it — that love teaches us how to stay with our own children.

Jesse's words — "Because you're always working" — changed something in how I live. I'm not perfect at presence; I still stumble, still let work creep in, still have to choose, over and over, to close the laptop and truly be here. But I'm choosing. Every single day, I'm choosing.

This is what breaking a generational cycle looks like: not healed, not whole, just awake to what matters and brave enough to protect it.

When you understand what presence is — when you've felt the ache of its absence in your own childhood and then watched your child grieve its absence in theirs — you begin to see time differently. Minutes matter more than money. Being there matters more than doing more. A conversation at the kitchen table, unhurried, is not a luxury. It's the foundation everything else is built on.

Psalm 90:12 asks us to number our days to gain a heart of wisdom. Matthew 7:24-25 asks what we're building on. If we're building careers and security and achievement on the foundation of absent parents, we're building on sand. The structure might look impressive, but the foundation is hollow.

"Everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock."

The only thing worth building on is presence. Relationship. The daily, unglamorous, utterly ordinary act of showing up and staying.

Norway understands this. They've built a society around it — shorter working hours, generous parental leave, a cultural refusal to treat exhaustion as a virtue. Underneath all the policy is a simpler conviction: a child's need for a present parent isn't a luxury to be squeezed around work. It's the actual point.

The rest of us have dressed up absence as provision for so long that we've forgotten they aren't the same thing.

Two decades into unlearning Vanderbijlpark, I'm still learning. Still choosing. Still closing the laptop when my boys need presence.

My son was seven when he told me the truth: "Because you're always working."

May we all hear it before the window closes. May we all be brave enough to refuse the false halo. May we all understand that what we're building isn't worth the hours we're stealing to build it.