The father and the worker

'Daddy."

It is still dark outside when I hear the girl call from upstairs. My 6-year-old daughter is awake, and I'm in my usual place. Living room table in front of laptop.

"I'll be right there," I shout back and then try to hammer out the end of the line I had started. Inevitably, I'm still crunching when a second "Daddy" sounds. My gut registers a slight annoyance (Can't you let me finish?), but it's met by a stronger wave of guilt.

Poor kid: She just woke up and wants to see her father.

This scenario plays out about three mornings a week. That's when my wife, Carlene, has to scoot out the door by 6:15. For several years it was easy for me to deal with the ritual as a kind of subconscious, below-the-surface battle between me, the worker, and me, the father. That changed a few weeks ago when, for the first time, Lila made a more direct observation about my relationship with my MacBook.

We were playing a game over breakfast. It involved my doing a fake French accent so over the top that it could only fool a vice presidential candidate. Lila thought this character, this French chef, hilarious so I kept at it.

Except I eventually had to stop. I had a story due that morning. And I had been up the night before, late, working on an outside project. And this being a Monday, Carlene had hustled off to her job. So I also needed to get the kid's lunch together and lay out the day's clothing. But first, my assignment.

Lila wanted the chef back. When I didn't comply, she didn't lose her cool. She just said, in a sadly resigned voice, "Daddy, why are you always on the computer?"

The mind - or my mind - often remembers strange little anecdotes. For some reason, I think of a brief exchange I had with Peter Case, a musician I was writing about a few years ago. Case rambles all over the country playing gigs, some for audiences small enough to fit in my living room. But he loves what he does.

Back then, I asked him about his three children, and whether he was ever tempted to stay home and be a house dad. No, he told me. Your kids need to know you're passionate about something. You don't want them to one day wonder who that guy wearing an apron and flipping pancakes might be.

Of course, that could just be a neat way for me to justify my poor parenting.

For help, I called Bryan E. Robinson, a North Carolina psychotherapist who wrote "Chained to the Desk: A Guide for Workaholics, Their Partners and Children, and the Clinicians Who Treat Them."

"What we know, from our research, is that children of workaholics often have higher levels of anxiety, depression, and tend to be more concerned with what other people think of them," he told me. "Which is the same stuff with the children who grew up in an alcoholic home. It becomes a family disease."

Now that didn't seem good.

But then Robinson pulled back. He wasn't prepared to say I was a workaholic.

I took a two-dozen question quiz he and his researchers had developed. He read me the questions - "I find myself continuing to work after my co-workers have called it quits" or "I feel guilty when I'm not working on something" - and I recorded my answers on a scale of 1 to 4. A score of 57 and above would confirm my workaholic status. I scored a 52.

"Then you're not a workaholic," he said.

By five points.

I have a plan, and it's not to merely tell Lila I'm passionate about my work.

If I'm at home, and she asks for me, I'm going to try to immediately move away from the keyboard. If I don't, Lila will develop a sense that her question or comment or activity is always second best. And it isn't. One day Lila will be old enough to know better, and she'll keep to herself, head out with her friends and, even worse, move out. And I'll probably have a much nicer laptop and plenty of inspiring assignments. I know, at that moment, I'll be wishing I could trade it in for one more phony accent.

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.