To Go or Not to Go

Interesting quandary here. Joe Posnanski posted about a decision he’s trying to make. Here are the facts of the case:

- Joe is in Beijing covering the Olympics.
- When he flies back next Sunday, he will have been there for three weeks.
- Joe has a wife and two children (ages 6 and 8 I think), whom he will not have seen for those three weeks.
- There is a Bruce Springsteen concert in his hometown the night that he arrives.
- This is the last stop on the tour and Springsteen is old (the implication being that there may not be another tour).

So what do you do? Do you go to the concert or do you stay home with the family? Joe put it to his readers and the vote is 58% - 42% in favor of going to the concert. This surprised me, although I’m not sure if it should have. I got into a little thing with someone on the message boards over there about the merits of family, but I didn’t want to continue that, so I thought I’d pose the question over here.

My vote, as you can probably guess, was to stay home with the wife and kids. Maybe I just don’t “get” Springsteen, but then again, I can’t think of ANY band that would make that decision difficult for me. Is Springsteen that transcendental? So I tried to think of something comparable that might make this decision difficult and be apropos to my reader(s). (There is more than one, I think.)

Let’s say the Angels (substitute your favorite team here) are playing game 7 of the World Series the night you get home from a 3-week business trip. What are your options (assume that money isn’t that big of an issue and you could get tickets that would be worth the price)?
1. Stay home and hang out with the wife (and kids in my case)
2. Try to find a babysitter and take my wife to the game, or take the whole family
3. Go to the game by myself or with other friends

Now a baseball game is slightly different from a concert in that I could record the game at home and watch it at my leisure once the kids have gone to bed. So let’s take that option away – if you don’t go to the game, you can’t see it (for whatever reason, just play along with me here) and the closest you’ll get is seeing highlights or reading about it in the paper.

If I didn’t have kids, the obvious choice would be to bring my wife to the game. My wife enjoys baseball enough that she would go to the WS with me so we could spend time together. But my kids are too young to appreciate the World Series and would probably just be scared by the huge, raucous crowd. Even if they were older, it’s hard to spend quality time with your children when you’re in the midst of a tense, loud group of 45,000 other people. Going to the game without my family wouldn’t be an option.

I would pick number one. Am I missing a once in a lifetime opportunity? Maybe – but we don’t know for sure. They could be back in the series next year. And the bottom line is that this is entertainment. This isn’t real life. Missing a game won’t cause anyone any harm. There are no negative ramifications of not being at a World Series game.

Would there be negative ramifications of not spending time with my family after three weeks away? Aside from the obvious lack of, ahem, “relations” that would probably occur, it sends a message that family is not my priority, which it should be. And the other thing is that I have fun with my family. Spending time with them is not some punishment – I love hanging out with my wife and kids. My two-year-old is doing new things every day, and after three weeks away, I can’t imagine how exciting it would be to see all those new things. Heck, I’m amazed when I come home from work!

Would it make anyone a bad husband/father if they decided to go? Not necessarily; I just don’t see how anyone really committed to being a good husband/father could make that choice. To each his own, I suppose.