I live in Manassas and commute to Arlington. That’s roughly 30 miles. Traffic in the DC metro area, however, means that it might as well be 100, for all the time it takes to get anywhere. Add the cost of gas and the wear and tear on your car (and your nerves) and driving just doesn’t pan out. Instead, I take public transit.

My daily commute involves three legs. First, I drive the four, blessed, unencumbered-by-traffic miles to the Virginia Railway Express station. I park my car (a full tank driving back and fourth lasts me a month) and walk to the tracks.

VRE runs a pretty tight ship, and the trains are (usually) timely. My regular train leaves the station at 6:47AM. I arrive at my Metro transfer point at about 7:30. From there, I go about eight stops, backtrack one on a different line, and repeat the process in reverse order coming home.

Total commute time is roughly 3-4 hours. If everything is running on time. Of course, everything I’ve written up to this point was because that didn’t happen, and standing around waiting for the train for an hour seemed the thing to do, while I typed this up on my Treo. (In fairness to VRE, it wasn’t their fault; it was the fault of the railroad provider CSX, whose network went down.)

Yesterday, instead of VRE, Metro had systemwide problems. Problems that I didn’t get an e-mail alert about until I had paid for and was entering my train (instead of hopping on a bus). I sat in a tunnel on a very hot train (our temps here have been mid-nineties and humid) that used about 60 seconds of air conditioning for every 10 minutes of wait time. The train barely moved for nearly an hour as we waited for the backup ahead of us to clear. I found myself, as my window for making my connection to get home slowly closed, alternating between asking for the intercession of St. Jude and muttering four-letter-words.

Every time the system screws up, it costs me. Sometimes it’s time, sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s both. Last night, I almost missed my last connection home. Today, I had to go wake up Jamie and the kids to have them bring me 15 miles to the nearest metro stop (I needed her to HOV, since I-95 is a parking lot and my Honda needs repairs that keep me from using it on longer trips), using gas that wasn’t in the budget and making me late for work.

I am an understanding and forgiving sort of guy. This is getting ridiculous, however. Since the beginning of June, I’d say on average I’m facing delays 85-90% of the time, on either VRE or Metro. Usually it’s only 10 or 15 minutes, but considering the overlapping schedules and need to make connections, even that can be a problem. Sitting on a track for 10 minutes can cost me an extra half hour getting home.  Last night I didn’t get home until after 8PM, and this morning, despite leaving my house at 6:30AM I didn’t get to work until after 9.

This is doesn’t work for me.

And yet there’s nothing I can do. Driving is worse. It’s more costly. It can take even longer. It’s more stressful. At least on the train I can get my reading and praying done. In my car, I mostly just hit the steering wheel and swear.

I’ve always liked living in this area, but that affinity can wear awfully thin. Cost of living pushes me out of the city further and further while the need to put food on the table keeps me hauling by sorry butt in. Not that working closer to home is much better, if it’s somewhere that figures into the popular traffic patterns. Going 18 miles on the smaller roads that take you to closer job centers can take as long or longer than taking the train 35 miles into downtown DC. At some point, without some kind of drastic change, the cost/benefit ratio of living here will tip over and dump me in a big mess. I’ve got to start moving, but I’ll admit - it’s hard to take a leap of faith when you feel like you’re hovering over an abyss.

This morning as Jamie dropped me at the Metro, Sophia announced that she wanted to go with me. I had only seen her for all of about 5 minutes before bed last night, and she’s usually still sleeping when I leave in the morning. When I told her that she couldn’t come with me, that I had to go to work, she started to cry. Not the annoying, loud, spoiled toddler cry she’s so good at, but the lip out, genuinely sad, fairly quiet, whimpering cry of a daughter who simply misses her daddy.

It broke my heart.

Trying to think on my feet, I quickly reached in my pocket and pulled out a penny. I told her that it was a lucky penny, and I asked her if she would hold onto it until I came home. She agreed, a big tear slowly tracing it’s way down her big, round cheek, and she said we should put it in the basket. (She meant the one at Church.) I finished up my goodbyes and made my way to the station before I started tearing up too.

Watch out for the abyss.

A time comes when things must change, when they are simply not able to continue as they are. I’m good at burying myself in distractions - the blog, my books, my writing, a late-evening video game or movie with Jamie. Even in the nightly cocktail that takes the edge off the fact that by the time I get home and eat and get cleaned up, it’s almost time to go to bed so I can do it all over again. But it takes only a little nudge, a few bumps in the road, or in this case, a couple days of obnoxious train delays, to make me look up from wherever I’m hiding and see that the driving need to do something to make it better is nipping at my heels.

Change is hard. I’m not good at it. I’m the sort of guy who evaluates all the options, carefully weighing and measuring until the clock runs out. If you’ve ever done that, you know - there’s no better way to get stuck right where you are.

God has a funny way of pushing us, nudging us, making us see we’re missing something without connecting all the dots for us. I wish He’d connect them more often. I’d be less worried, if I was doing what I knew He wanted, that I’d fail.  I don’t want the responsibility for charting a course. I am too oblivious, I make too many mistakes.

The other night, with a number of things coming down on me at once, I was feeling the stress. I wanted to lash out, so I knew I needed to get out, or I would have blown up at one of the kids, or thrown a lawn chair (I almost did) or something equally stupid. So I took a nice long walk. I prayed all 15 decades of my Rosary at once for perhaps the first time in over a decade. As I came around a corner, studying the plants as I stumbled through my petitions, it hit me.

It’s on me. All of it. I can ask God for help, and my loving wife for her support (and my kids for their joy) but it’s on my shoulders. By the end of February, I’ll have four kids. I’ll have a wife who is completely dependent on me to support her because it is no longer feasible for her to do much in the way of supplemental work. I have no safety net. No backup plan. No savings. No home of my own. Just challenges, dissatisfactions, more bills than I can shake a stick at, and looming monsters which usually want to eat my money, what little of it there is. Sure, we’re keeping our heads above water today, but what about tomorrow?

As I walked, I remembered being a kid, and listening to my parents talk in their room at night about whatever they were facing. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it didn’t matter. What I realized in those moments was that my dad was the barrier between us and the world. That there was no one to protect him, to pay his bills, to protect his family, to make sure it was going to be OK. Nobody but him. I knew in my bed that night that nothing could be scarier than to be a dad, and I was glad it was a long way off for me.

And now, suddenly, I’m him. I’m 30, which used to be “old”, and yet I still feel like a kid. I remember High School like it was last year, and sometimes I still feel like I’m in college. Even that memory of me laying in the bottom bunk, my brothers sleeping in the room with me, feels recent enough to touch. Some will say I’m only 30, but I always thought I’d be wiser, have more answers, get more things figured out by now.

But if I’ve learned one thing, it’s this: even as a dad, I still have a Father looking out for me, and if He isn’t the barrier between me and the world, He is the one I turn to when the world gets too scary. When I go to bed at night, I ask Him to take some of that weight, and when I arise in the morning, I ask Him to help me to shoulder the burden. On my way home from work, I ask Him to help me to be a good husband and father, to master my fears and anxieties, and to keep my worries from ruining my time with my family. I try to go to Him with everything, because I can’t do it on my own.

I suppose the truth is that I want Him to carry me. Problem is, He keeps telling me I’m too big. I don’t have the answers to the challenges I face. I can’t wrap them up neatly in a post written on my lunch break. I don’t even know when I’ll find them, or if, once I do, they’ll be the right ones.

But what I won’t do again is be found guilty of not trying. If I’m going to be wrong, I’ll come by it honestly. I’m tired of looking back and seeing only what I failed to do because I was afraid to fail.

Abyss or not, it’s time to grab hold of my bootstraps and let fly. The distance may be smaller than I think.

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