DADDY, WHY ARE YOU WORKING?

It started with a question I could not answer.

My daughter had come to find me at my home desk. She is two years and nine months old and she had already done her research. She had gone to her mother first. Mummy, why is Daddy working? Her mother gave the correct answer. Daddy is working so he can put food on the table.

She was not satisfied.

So she came to me directly. Daddy, why are you working?

I paused.

I genuinely did not know what to say. Whatever I said was not going to make sense to her. She was not asking for an economic explanation. She was asking why I was choosing the laptop over her. In her mind, when I go to the office I go into work time. She stays home. That is the arrangement. But when I open the laptop at home, I am going into her time. She can see me. I am right there. And I am also completely somewhere else.

I had no answer for that.

So I did what you do when a two year old asks a question you cannot answer.

I said something that did not mean anything, and I went back to the laptop.

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What happened next

She stayed in the room.

I was not worried. She was safe, she was occupied, and I was busy. She could play nearby. I did not need to know exactly what she was doing as long as she was not doing anything dangerous.

This is the logic of a man who is very focused on his laptop.

What she had quietly identified, on the book shelf in the room, was a zip-up wallet she had never opened before. Old. Dusty. Full of things I had not thought about in years.

She unzipped it.

She pulled out every disc.

She distributed them across the living room floor with the calm efficiency of someone completing an important assignment.

By the time I noticed, most of them were already out. KOMZ PC. EA Games. Windows 7. Top Gear. Prison Break. Two and a Half Men. How I Met Your Mother. Engineering coursework from UNZA. Photos from my early years at Davis and Shirtliff. MP3 collections. My cousin’s wedding photos.

Everything I had once decided was worth keeping, labelled carefully in blue and black marker, now on the floor.

She had moved on before I even registered what had happened.

I stood there and did not pick them up immediately.

I took a photograph.

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The thing about the labels

Each disc had been handled with intention. Sleeved. Labelled. Stored in a wallet I carried around for years as though it contained something essential.

Less than fifteen years later, my daughter cannot identify what a CD is for.

The laptop I am writing this on does not have a CD drive. The engineering data I preserved so carefully is on a format that requires hardware I no longer own. Windows 7 stopped being supported in 2020. How I Met Your Mother ran for nine seasons and I apparently felt the need to burn several of them onto physical discs for safekeeping.

Looking at them on the floor, the things I had treated most seriously, including the engineering files, and other data, were lying next to How I Met Your Mother with equal dignity.

A tiled floor is not sentimental.

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The part that is not about CDs

Here is where the photograph stopped being funny.

Because she had asked me why I was working and I had no answer. And then while I was busy not having an answer and continuing to work anyway, she had quietly pulled my past off the shelf and scattered it across the room.

And standing there looking at those labels, I started thinking about what I was so busy doing that I did not notice.

Not just that afternoon. In general.

The content consumed and forgotten by the weekend. The worries nursed for weeks about things that resolve without my involvement. The hours given to things that feel urgent because they are in front of me, not because they will matter.

All of it handled with the same seriousness I gave to a Two and a Half Men disc in 2010.

There is a version of busy that produces things which last. The relationships tended slowly over years. The knowledge built through genuine work that ends up inside you rather than on a disc. The presence given to a two year old who came to your desk with a real question and deserved a real answer.

And there is another version of busy that is just the current format. The digital equivalent of labelling discs carefully and storing them in a wallet nobody will open for fifteen years.

I am not always sure which one I am doing.

She had her answer

In the end, my daughter got what she came for.

Not from me. From the shelf.

She asked why I was working, got no satisfying answer, and then found something far more interesting than the laptop. Dozens of shiny circles, each one worth pulling out and placing somewhere new.

She was not wrong about any of it.

The discs were more interesting than what I was doing. And she got more of my attention scattered across the floor than she had gotten sitting beside me while I was working.

I eventually picked them up.

Not because I needed them. Because the room floor is not a filing system.

But I left the wallet on the shelf where I can see it from my desk.

It is a useful thing to have in eyeline.

A reminder that some of what I am most carefully preserving right now will look, in fifteen years, exactly like those discs on the floor. And some of what I am too busy to pay attention to, such as the question from the two year old or the pause before going back to the laptop, will be the thing I wish I had given more of myself to.

The question is which is which.

She is still waiting for a better answer than the one I gave.

So am I.

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