A Good Life Except for the Boring Parts

The first time my son called me “Daddy” was also the last time he ever did.

It happened today — a single word that felt like the end of all hopes.

I’d dreamed of this moment for so long.

Yet now all I feel is a bitter, heavy regret.

Let me tell you the truth.

It all began years ago.

At the time we had a good family. I had a stable job.

Tommy was almost three, and we — like any anxious parents — worried that he still hadn’t spoken a single word.

In our family, the past was always up for debate.

My wife’s stepmother insisted that children had developed faster “before the screens and the hurry of modern life,” and she believed Tommy was growing up in a world far too loud for a small boy — too many distractions, too little quiet. To her, the past was easy, simple, and made sense.

My elder brother argued the opposite — that life had never been more convenient for kids or adults, and that people simply enjoyed complaining.

Everyone had an opinion.

None of it helped Tommy speak.

At that time Tommy’s cousin Lucy was six — bright, endlessly talkative.

She had said “mama” at four months old.

Her parents lived two streets over, in a house always full of music and people.

We used to envy them.

Whenever we visited, Tommy hid behind my leg while Lucy dragged out her colored pencils and tried to make him laugh.

She was sunshine — and she made our worries feel sharper.

Oh — I forgot to introduce us.

My name is Steve. And my wife’s name was Betty. I always told her it was the most beautiful name in the world.

Well, maybe my work played its part in all those problems.

Tommy was always tense because his father was never home.

I worked for Boring Delivery Corporation, or BDC. People smiled at the name, but for us it meant long shifts, unpredictable departures, and distant assignments.

The founders said they chose the name to glorify routine — the thing they believed made precision possible.

Well, changing it wasn’t up to me.

Don’t get me wrong — I loved my job. I really did.

But some cracks form in silence. Mine began the moment work became the place I lived, and home became the place I only visited.

Sometimes I’d spend weeks away, returning for only a handful of days before leaving again.

Betty hated it.

The schedule was the worst part: fixed, rigid, untouchable.

No days off you could take yourself.

Two official breaks a year.

And BDC didn’t negotiate — not with family emergencies, not with illness, not with anything. We focused on clients, never on workers.

When I had my rare days at home, evenings were simple.

Betty with her magazines, me with my newspaper — talking like people who still believed things could work.

Our house was small, a little noisy. The radiator clanked at night, the kitchen radio hummed on the same two stations, and our postman often asked how Tommy was doing.

People knew each other’s worries then — or at least pretended to.

Our family car was a used Volkswagen Beetle from the 60s.

We almost never traveled outside North Carolina, which only made it more irritating for Betty that I was always away 'on trips' for deliveries.

For me it was just work — and honestly, there wasn’t much to see in those places anyway.

You might not believe it, but that’s the truth.

When Tommy was three and a half, Betty told me she was fed up.

She had put her career on hold — “for a while,” she said — at the prestigious Bell Company.

She had a real ladder ahead of her, being not only one of their fastest switchboard operators but also naturally good at managing people.

She finally talked me into the idea of splitting up.

And then I had to leave for another shift.

Suddenly I felt sixteen again — unsure of what to say, what to do, or where I fit.

People used to say I was “too quiet” or “too clumsy,” and I believed them.

So I never hurried into anything — not friendships, not love, especially not marriage.

And then I met Betty.

She was the first person who made me feel that maybe I wasn’t broken — just still growing.

And now I had let her down — in the worst possible way.

When I returned two weeks later, she had moved back to her mother’s.

Shortly after, Betty sent me a message:

“Today Tommy said ‘mama’ for the first time! It was a pity you couldn’t be here.”

I called her. No answer.

And a strange regret washed over me — as if I had been the problem all along.

As if the moment they left our house, everything finally fell into place for him…

Three months after our breakup, she messaged again:

“Steve, me, Tommy and my boyfriend will be visiting Charlotte. Are you there? You can meet Tommy.”

“What?” was all I managed to say.

We weren’t even divorced — and she was already dating?

But no, I had no opportunity to be in Charlotte.

My company sent me to another location.

That shift I felt truly terrible.

I finally realized I’d lost Betty forever.

That same week my boss told me I was being promoted.

My uncle used to say, “Funny how life hands you the good and the unbearable in the very same breath.”

Only then did I truly understand what he meant.

When I was home next time and asked if I could visit them and meet Tommy, her answer was surprisingly cold:

“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

I kept asking, trying to understand what had changed, but it only pushed her farther away.

We still kept in touch — in a distant, official sort of way.

Then we got divorced.

She was given control over my visitation, since my long shifts made me look like an unstable parent.

Whenever I tried to arrange a meeting, she simply said,

“It’s complicated.”

In the end, I would discover her reason — too late.

As my grandma said,

“People think fate is a straight line. Truth is, it wobbles like a shopping cart with one bad wheel.”

And at that moment, it felt like she was talking about my life exactly.

More than a year passed.

I eventually got an office manager position at BDC.

And there I finally understood.

There was a reason for the rigid schedule — both psychological and related to safety.

We were the biggest company handling interplanetary deliveries for miners, drill stations, and exploration units.

On Earth we expedited packages and cargo to the ocean shelf and below, as well as to deep underground settlements up to five miles down — a standard since the 2120s.

Our clients weren’t just on Earth anymore: the Moon, Mercury.

And Venus… well, it was still trouble in every sense.

Thank God we hadn’t spread farther than Mars and its satellites.

With advancements in propulsion, a one-way trip to the Moon took just two days — the same as reaching remote underwater outposts or Antarctic stations tangled in bureaucracy.

But going to Mars or a Sun-orbiting station still swallowed a month or more.

People’s lives and mental health depended on these deliveries — medicine, supplies, even letters.

There was no room for flexibility.

Even so, I tried suggesting a few ideas to top management, telling them my story.

They listened — politely — but took any steps reluctantly.

Across centuries, companies have never learned to care about workers — especially those at the bottom.

And I knew it firsthand.

That was the reason my father never came home.

He disappeared during a scout mission a mile below the ocean surface, sent down by a research unit that treated safety like an optional expense.

I was five.

I remember the day they came to the door.

The knock.

My mother’s face — how all the color drained at once.

Her trying not to cry in front of me… which somehow made the fear even sharper.

Maybe that was the moment something in me locked into place — the quiet promise that if I ever worked in this industry, I’d try to make it safer than the world that took him.

But that was long, long ago…

And sometimes I wonder:

if I’d understood all this back then — the danger, the schedules, the pressure — could I have explained it to Betty?

Would it have changed anything?

Honestly… I still doubt it.

I expected too much from the company. Betty expected too much from me.

“Everyone thinks the world around them should improve,” my mom liked to repeat,

“But the real question is whether we hurry up to improve ourselves.”

And the truth is, Betty wasn’t ready to change back then —

and neither was I.

I was a slowpoke, always hoping things would sort themselves out.

Actually, I was happy for Betty when she eventually got an AI-adjustment engineering position at the New-Bell Corp.

But I still hadn’t managed to convince her to let me see Tommy.

And shortly after that, I met her.

Anaya Kira was a flight attendant for PanAm Skyways.

We both felt it was destiny after my flight on her route — two people who had lived through separate storms and somehow ended up in the same calm.

She carried her own scars: a troubled childhood, toxic relationships, losing her parents early.

Sometimes she slipped into doubt, convinced she didn’t deserve anything good.

I tried to be there for her — steady, present — the way I wished someone had been for me.

But our jobs were painfully incompatible.

I was terrified the same story would repeat — distance, absences, the slow unraveling of a family.

She even said she’d break her PanAm contract.

But that felt wrong — unfair.

We almost argued about who should quit — two people equally dedicated to their work, and to each other.

At that time I met an old childhood friend — the kind of guy who had always been into strange practices, symbols, energies, all that.

He spent half an hour telling me — with absolute seriousness — that according to Feng Shui the name “Boring” in my company’s title brought bad luck in every possible sense. He looked completely convinced that it drew bad energy and low spirits, destroying the “right balance.”

I didn’t believe a word of it, of course. Besides, why didn’t it affect the company itself?

But something about that conversation stayed with me.

Maybe because he was right about one thing: you can’t keep living the same life and expect anything to change.

And the truth was, BDC no longer matched who I wanted to become.

Not in spirit. Not in balance. Not in energy.

So I left.

I stepped out of BDC — and into consulting.

To my surprise, I had more experience than I’d ever admitted to myself: shaping the impossible schedules of thousands of delivery units, crew management, leadership, and even emotional-balance mentoring.

And when I opened my own Complex Consulting Company, I had clients from day one — even some calling from Mars and Mercury.

But I didn’t compromise: if they needed me, they could come to North Carolina.

When Anaya moved in after our wedding, we finally threw away that old two-channel radio so many companies gave out back then — one channel for corporate interplanetary news, the other for Earth.

I fixed the heating too, and the radiator became as quiet as a Martian desert at dusk.

Anaya even convinced PanAm Skyways to give her a more flexible schedule — and, surprisingly, that change began spreading across the industry.

For our honeymoon we took the same Volkswagen Beetle and drove from the East Coast to the West.

Even though it had been produced back in the 2160s, it was powerful and reliable — fully electric, true European engineering.

After long days on the road we’d sit together in a tiny motel:

she flipping through digital magazines — curated bundles of literature vlogs,

me scrolling through my newspapers — mostly columnist video feeds on life and politics.

Two glowing flex-screens, side by side — the future keeping the gestures of the past.

And then we talked for hours — the kind of talking that makes the world outside feel paused.

We were like a vanilla bun that rose just right — her warmth, my steadiness, something better together than apart.

On the way back she told me we’d have a baby.

It felt like a miracle.

At the same time she kept encouraging me to rebuild things with Tommy.

I tried — but Betty never agreed.

She sent photos sometimes, and I saw them on social media.

Tommy must’ve been about five and a half then.

We drove through Tennessee and decided to stop in Nashville for the next day.

In the morning Anaya stayed at the hotel, and I went out after breakfast to buy a few things for the final stretch of our trip.

The city had already woken up.

Second Avenue North was quieter than the streets around it: old brick buildings catching the morning light, a few delivery robots weaving between people, tourists checking their maps.

I walked toward the newly built mall, enjoying the warmth and the easy beauty of the morning.

And then I saw them among the other passersby.

Betty.

And Tommy.

They were walking down the sidewalk in my direction. She was holding his little backpack; he was skipping slightly, humming something, trying to match her pace.

I froze.

My heart slammed against my ribs so hard it almost hurt.

He had grown.

Taller. Steadier. So heartbreakingly familiar.

I didn’t breathe.

For a moment — one impossible, bright, stupid moment — I almost lifted my hand.

I almost shouted, “Hey!”

Like some cheerful stranger from a past life who believed a single smile could fix a family.

And then he exclaimed:

“Daddy!”

Tommy shouted — loudly, happily — and ran straight toward me.

Everything inside me collapsed.

The world tilted.

The air vanished.

He knew who I was.

He—

“Hey, Tommy!”

A voice behind me — warm, young, confident — cut straight through my thoughts.

I turned just as a tall, red-haired man with a short beard rushed past me, running toward my son. They met halfway, Tommy leaping into his arms with the kind of joy that didn’t belong to me.

The man held him tightly, lifting him with the ease of someone who’d done it a hundred times before.

Tommy buried his face in his shoulder.

The man laughed softly.

Something in me tore — quietly — like an old seam finally giving up.

Then I looked at Betty.

She had seen me.

Her eyes flicked to mine for a fraction of a second — and then she looked away.

Embarrassed.

Pretending she hadn’t recognized me.

The morning suddenly turned colder.

I swallowed — or tried to — but the lump in my throat wouldn’t move.

My palms were trembling, and I hid them in my pockets as I walked past them, measuring each step so I wouldn’t falter.

I didn’t look back.

Instead, memories surged up:

The nights by Tommy’s crib.

Betty whispering he would definitely say “Daddy” first.

The way she laughed when he squeezed my finger.

The fragile belief finally broke.

All of it felt like another lifetime now —

a life that had slipped through my fingers long before I realized it.

And I understood something fearful:

The first time my son called me “Daddy” was also the last time he ever did.

And the sound of it still echoes with a loss I can’t bear to name.

Yet I didn’t give up hope.

It wasn’t the end — not for me, and not for him.

Tommy would grow.

He would start asking questions.

He would see old photos, old records.

And one day — when he was ready — he would come looking.

And when that day comes…

I’ll be there.

I did my shopping and got back.

Anaya comforted me the way she always did.

We’d learned to hold each other up — quietly, instinctively.

And whatever we had planned for the day in Nashville… well, it became a day for the three of us already.

We both believed Tommy would someday be happy to know he had a little brother.

Or a sister — we still didn’t know.

As for Betty — I could wait.

Her choice, her timing.

Maybe fear explains some of it.

Maybe it’s just life.

I often remembered what my first teacher liked to say:

“We don’t always get what we want, but sometimes we get another chance to try.”

We all get new chances, one way or another.

My Tommy looked happy — that mattered most…

A soft chime on my phone.

A message from her.

We read it together. It said:

“Sorry. My doctors told me before the divorce that it was better for Tommy to know only one father. He’d already had enough stress. I didn’t know how to tell you. I apologize. Please understand.”

We reread it, both of us in quiet tears of relief.

Now we knew Betty had simply been trying to protect Tommy.

Yes, life made another turn.

Here, I finally said goodbye to the man I used to be.

And in the end, it doesn’t matter how much we expect from others —

from companies, from loved ones, from the world itself.

People change slowly. Life changes in its own strange ways.

I can’t rewrite what happened.

Neither can Betty.

But chances do come back around, if we’re brave enough to meet them.

We don’t get to fix everything.

But we do get to choose who we become next.

And I choose to be here —

for Anaya,

for the little one on the way,

and someday… for Tommy, when he’s ready.

That, I think, is enough to begin again.