Two Weeks Sitting Still

My daughter's teacher asked the class to write about a time a parent changed, and she came home and asked me directly, so here's the honest version. I used to work eighty hour weeks and barely knew my own kids in Huntsville, until a health scare that turned out to be nothing forced me to sit still for two weeks. In that stillness I felt something confront me directly about the life I'd built, not with anger but with a patience that felt older than my own conscience, asking what exactly I thought I was building it for. I cut my hours in half within a month. My daughter says I'm different now. She's right, and I know I didn't get here alone.