Why Saturday Morning Is Mine

by Johnny
(golfeaser.com)

My daughter asked me last month why Saturday mornings are "golf time" and not "us time," and I gave her some version of an answer that satisfied her enough to move on to breakfast, and then spent most of the round two hours later still turning the question over in my head.

She's seven, old enough to notice patterns and ask about them, not quite old enough yet to accept "because it's important to me" as a complete explanation for anything. I told her golf time was how I stayed a good dad the rest of the week — happier, more patient, more like myself — which is true, as far as it goes, but I noticed even as I was saying it that it's the kind of answer that sounds better than it fully holds up under a seven-year-old's follow-up questions.

I've read the guides on this. Negotiating the weekend golf pass with a spouse is its own well-worn territory, and I've mostly got that part figured out — my wife and I settled into a rhythm on it years ago, she gets her own protected time in exchange, everybody's accounted for. What I haven't fully figured out is the version of this conversation that happens with a kid who doesn't yet understand trade-offs or protected time or any of the adult scaffolding that makes the arrangement feel fair to the people making it. To her, it's simpler than that. Dad leaves most Saturday mornings to do a thing that doesn't involve her, and she's old enough now to wonder why that thing gets to be the one that doesn't move.

I don't have a clean defense of it, honestly, and I think pretending I do would be dishonest to whatever this essay is supposed to be. Balancing golf against family time isn't a problem you solve once — it's one you keep half-solving, week after week, and every so often a kid asks a question sharp enough to make you re-examine an arrangement you'd stopped questioning yourself. I've told myself for years that a happier, more decompressed version of me on Saturday afternoon is worth more to my family than a version of me who gave up the round and spent the morning present but quietly resentful about it. I still believe that, mostly. I'm just less certain than I used to be that "mostly" is a good enough answer to give a kid who's starting to keep score.

What I ended up telling her, in the car on the way to school a few days later, was closer to the truth than my first answer had been: that I've had the same group of guys for a long time, that we look out for each other in ways that don't always look like much from the outside, and that some piece of me needs that as much as I need anything else in my week. She didn't fully get it — I'm not sure a seven-year-old is supposed to — but she stopped pushing on it, at least for now. I don't think this is a conversation with a final version. I think it's one I'll be having in different forms for years, as she gets old enough to ask harder questions than the one she asked last month, and I get, hopefully, a little better at answering them honestly instead of reaching for the version that just ends the conversation fastest.

I still went this Saturday. I'll probably go next Saturday too. I'm just carrying the question with me now in a way I wasn't before she asked it, and I think that's probably right — the kind of thing that should stay a little unsettled instead of getting filed away as solved. A few other guys in this group have their own versions of this one, and none of the ones I've heard end any cleaner than mine does.