What Time Away Teaches Us

Fellas,

What story will your child tell about you twenty years from now? Not the story neighbors whisper, not the one written in legal documents, and not the shallow version painted by people who never saw your heart.

I mean the real story the one that spills out when someone asks, “What was your dad like?” Will they say, “He was there. He asked me questions. He cared what I thought.” Or will they say, “He was too busy. He was too tired. He disappeared when things got hard.”

For some fathers, the story their children carry is shaped not only by their choices but also by accusations and misunderstandings that threaten to erase the truth. Sometimes, it is not failure or absence that defines a man, but the weight of a wrongful charge and the long fight to clear his name.

Two cases. One from Michigan, another from Southern California show just how fragile reputations can be, and how easily a devoted parent can be painted as something he is not.

Time Away

In 2014, Josh Burns and his wife rushed their infant daughter to the hospital after she showed troubling symptoms. Instead of help, Josh found himself accused.

A pediatrician concluded that the child’s injuries resembled shaken-baby syndrome, a diagnosis that for decades had been treated as near-certain proof of abuse. He was convicted and spent a year in jail.

To neighbors and casual readers of the headlines, he became the worst thing a father could be. But the Michigan Innocence Clinic uncovered serious flaws in the medical testimony and reliance on outdated diagnostic models.

Josh’s conviction was vacated, his name cleared, and his daughter grew up with the truth: her father was not an abuser, but a man who fought for his place in her life.

On the West Coast, Pedro Martinez endured a different nightmare. As a school janitor, he was accused of molesting multiple six-year-old children.

With no forensic evidence and only the weight of coerced or poorly handled interviews, he was jailed for nearly five years while awaiting trial. In the eyes of the public, his fate was sealed.

Yet after months of trial, a jury acquitted him of all charges. He returned to his family, five years later. Five years away from playtime, homework help, bedtime stories, birthdays, Christmases. That kind of absence is not just lost time; it is growth unshared. A five-year-old becomes ten.

A child who once ran to the door now feels the awkwardness of distance. Bonding is interrupted, trust is put on pause, and comfort is exchanged for confusion. His children, still so young when he was taken, grew up in a world where his presence existed more in memory than in reality.

While most dads will never face a wrongful accusation of this scale, many will know what absence does. Divorce can create its own kind of exile.

A demanding job can steal years just as surely as a courtroom. Even emotional withdrawal hiding behind silence, shame, or anger can make a father physically present but relationally gone. In each case, the impact on the child is similar. Milestones missed, trust weakened, connection broken.

But absence, even years of it, doesn’t have to be the last word. Relationships with children are incredibly resilient if fathers return with persistence and humility. Reconnection isn’t achieved through grand gestures; it’s rebuilt the same way trust was lost day by day.

Time away teaches us that children don’t pause their growth while we sort out our battles.
Time away teaches us that silence writes its own story in a child’s heart if we don’t speak into it.
It teaches us that repairing trust takes longer than breaking it, but repair is possible.

And it teaches us one more thing. The story your children tell about you isn’t written in stone. It is written in chapters. You may lose some chapters to absence or mistakes, but you can always write the next one differently.

For Fathers facing distance or absence

Plant Wisely

Values don’t come alive in the lectures we give. They come alive in the mistakes we make. Patience and perseverance are taught when you lose your temper and then circle back to repair.

Owning your faults in front of your kids doesn’t weaken your authority; it deepens your credibility.

And when you look at men like Josh Burns or Pedro Martinez fathers who were accused, mislabeled, and in some ways erased you see another layer of the same truth. The world may call you names.

Headlines may paint you unfairly. Mistakes, whether yours or someone else’s, may steal chapters you can never rewrite.

But the story your children tell about you isn’t shaped by those labels. It’s shaped by what they saw, what they heard, and how you showed up anyway.

When you think back on your childhood, what comes to mind first? Is it the fireworks the birthdays, the graduations, the big vacations? Maybe. But if you ask most people, it’s the little things that stick.

It’s the ride to school when Dad asked what song you wanted on the radio. It’s the bedtime when he leaned in close and whispered, “I’m proud of you.” It’s the morning he looked up from his coffee and asked, “Want the last pancake?”

These are not throwaway moments. They’re roots. They sink deep, and they hold.

And when those moments are missing when silence takes their place kids don’t interpret it as caution. They hear it as absence. Silence says, Maybe I don’t matter. Maybe he doesn’t care. Maybe this is my fault.

Words, even clumsy ones, can do the opposite. They can become shelter. A simple “How was your day?” or “Tell me something funny” can teach a child their voice matters and remind them they’re not alone.

So let me return to the question I began with,

 What story will your child tell about you twenty years from now? 

The answer is not fixed by the mistakes you’ve made, the years you’ve lost, or the accusations you’ve endured.

It is shaped by the story you choose to write now through humility,

through persistence, through the courage to show up again.

Because even in absence,

even in misunderstanding,

even after years of silence,

the seeds you plant today

can still grow.

until next time

Barkim