Most evenings in Dhaka, I come back to my room, take out my key, open the door, and walk in alone.

I eat. I call my family. We talk for a while. Then I sleep.

The next morning, I wake up, get ready, and go to work. Then I come back and do it again.

There is nothing unusual about this life. A lot of people live away from their families because their jobs are somewhere else. I am one of them.

But sometimes I wonder what this is doing to me.

I don’t think I am tired of working. I think I am tired of living away from the people I work for.

My wife and children live in our village home. I live in Dhaka because of my job.

I usually go home once every two or three months. Sometimes I can manage six or seven visits a year, usually three or four days each.

The journey itself is long. Dhaka to Bogura can take eight to ten hours, so I usually travel at night. That way, I can use most of the next day with my family.

If I go home seven times and stay four days each time, that is only 28 days. About one month, out of 365 days.

I don’t think about that number every day. But when I do, it bothers me.

My children are growing up while I am somewhere else. I can call them, send money, ask about school, or see them on a video call. But I am not there. And there is a difference.

I am there for the responsibility. Not for the everyday life.

I know what my responsibility is. I have to earn, support my family, and pay for food, education, medicine, and everything else a family needs. I don’t have a problem with that responsibility.

The problem is that providing money has slowly become almost the whole of my role.

If my son does well at school, he can send me a picture of his result, and I can call him and say, well done. But I would rather be there when he comes home, see his face, have him show me the paper himself, and sit beside him and talk about it.

If my daughter makes something with her own hands, I don’t want to see it only through a phone. I want her to run to me and say, Baba, look at this.

That is a very small thing. But those small things are what family life is made of. Money can provide for those moments. It cannot replace being there for them.

I have already missed some of them

My children are still very young. My son is five. My daughter is one. I know these years will pass quickly.

When my first child was born, I was working in Bogura. I was able to be there, but work still limited how much time I could spend with my family. When my daughter was born, I was working in Dhaka and could not get leave. My wife came home from the hospital, and I reached home three or four days later.

I wasn’t there.

My son started school recently, and I wasn’t there that morning either. Later, he came second in his first-term examination and sent me a photo of the result. I was happy. I called him and encouraged him. But I wasn’t there to see him come home with that result.

There have been birthdays I couldn’t attend, family occasions I missed, and times when the children were sick and my wife had to handle everything with help from the family. Recently, one of my uncles died. I couldn’t go, not because I didn’t want to, but because I simply couldn’t manage the leave.

These things stay with me, not because each one is a major event, but because there are so many of them. And I keep wondering how many more I am going to miss if nothing changes.

What does my wife carry when I am away?

My wife handles most of the everyday work at home. The children, their school, their health, their daily needs, the household. She also has to make decisions when something happens and I am not there.

Sometimes she tells me it would be easier if I were there. Not because she cannot manage, she does manage, but managing everything alone is different from having someone beside you.

If a child gets sick, I could take them to the doctor. If there is a school issue, I could deal with it. If there is a family decision, we could sit together and talk about it. Sometimes even a simple, don’t worry, we’ll handle it, can make a difference.

I also know that people often hide their problems from someone who is far away. My wife may have a difficult day and still smile when we talk on the phone. What else is she going to do? She knows I am already away from home, working.

I don’t want her to carry everything quietly just because I am the one earning the money. I want to carry some of it with her.

I have tried to solve this through my job

This is not the first time I have thought about living closer to my family. I actually tried.

Before Bogura, I worked in Dhaka. Then I moved to Bogura for a few years to stay closer to home. When I later looked for work around Bogura and Santahar, I found jobs, but none matched my salary, stability, or chances to grow. I even took a lower-paying job near home for a while, but it wasn’t enough to live on. In the end, I had to come back to Dhaka.

That experience taught me something important. Wanting to live with your family is one thing. Being able to support them while doing it is another.

If I found a reasonably secure job near home, even if the salary was a little lower than what I earn now, I would seriously consider it. I don’t need the highest possible salary. I need enough income, enough stability, and enough time with my family. Those things matter to me more now than career growth for its own sake.

I am not trying to build the city again in the village

That would miss the point if I simply tried to build another version of my current life out there. I don’t need the city’s entertainment, the traffic, or the chase for every career opportunity. I want a life where I have more time for the things I actually enjoy. My wife likes sewing. I like reading.

I want time to work in the garden, take care of the land and pond, write, learn, and build my online work. I also want my children to have time to read, ask questions, and learn things outside school, and I want to have tea with my wife in the evening, walk outside, and sit with my children. None of these things are expensive, but right now, I don’t have enough time for them.

That is the strange part. I am working to provide a good life for my family, but the work itself is taking me away from the life I am trying to provide.

What would an ordinary day look like?

I don’t imagine every day in the village being perfect. There will be work, problems, bills, sick children, broken things, bad weather, and days when nothing goes according to plan. I am not looking for a problem-free life. I just want to be there for the normal days.

Wake up in the morning. Pray Fajr. Wake the children. Maybe go for a walk together while the morning is still cool. Come back and have breakfast. The children study. I work in the garden for a while, then move on to my online projects. My wife does her things. The children play, read, study, and come to me with their questions.

In the evening, we sit together with a cup of tea. I tell my wife about something interesting I read that day. My son tells me about school, and my daughter shows me something she made. Later, my wife and I might go for a short walk together.

Nothing special. Just a normal evening with my family. That is exactly what I want.

I want to be part of the small things

Sometimes I imagine catching a few big shing fish from our pond. I bring them home, my wife cooks them, and we all sit together and eat. It is just a simple family moment, but I know I would remember it.

I might sit with my son and help him understand something he is struggling with. My daughter might bring me something she made and show it to me. We might sit together and make something else.

These are the moments I miss. Not vacations, not expensive restaurants, not big celebrations. The ordinary things, the things that happen when people actually live together.

This is also why my online work matters

This connects to the plan I wrote about in my previous article. I am not trying to leave my job tomorrow. I know I cannot do that. I have debt to clear, I need savings, and I need stable income outside my job. That is why I am building things on the side: affiliate marketing, digital work, writing, and other online income sources.

Some of them may work, some may not, and I will probably have to try several things before I find something stable enough. But the goal is not simply to make extra money. The bigger goal is to make my income less dependent on one employer and one city.

If I can eventually earn enough from online work and other sources, I can take my work with me. Then I don’t have to choose between earning money and being with my family. That is what this is really about. Not a way to stop working. A way to work without having to live somewhere else.

I also want my children to know me as their father, not just as someone who sends money

This may be the part I think about most.

Children grow up. They don’t stay five or one forever. Today my son wants to show me his school result, and today my daughter wants to show me something she made. A few years from now, they will have different interests, different friends, different problems.

If I am still away most of the year, I may still be their father. They will know that I work for them and send money home, and they may even respect me for it. But that is not the same as having a close relationship.

I don’t want my children to remember me mainly through phone calls. I want them to remember sitting beside me, walking with me, reading with me. Talking to me, arguing with me sometimes, asking me questions. I want to be around long enough for them to know what kind of person I actually am, and I want to know who they are becoming.

I don’t want to decide their whole life for them

I have ideas about what I want to teach my children. I want them to understand that a job is not the only way to earn. I want them to learn useful skills, read, communicate well, and understand money and responsibility.

But I don’t want to decide their future for them. Maybe my son will want to work in a company. Maybe my daughter will want a completely different life. Maybe they will choose something I cannot even imagine today. That’s fine. I don’t need them to copy my life. I want them to know that they have choices.

If I can give them that understanding, that may be more valuable than simply leaving them money.

The village is not perfect either

There are real downsides. Fewer job opportunities. Less convenient services. Sometimes problems with electricity, transport, or healthcare.

But I know what I am giving up and what I am getting in return. I may earn less, but I may need less. I may have fewer career opportunities, but I may have more time. I may have fewer city conveniences, but I may have my family under the same roof.

For me, that trade makes sense. I am not trying to prove that village life is better for everyone. It is simply closer to the kind of life I want.

What I am really trying to change

For a long time, I thought the main problem was my job. Then I thought maybe the problem was Dhaka. Now I think the problem is bigger than either one.

The problem is that my work, my income, my home, and my family are all in different places. One part of my life is in Dhaka, another part is in the village, and I spend most of my time moving between them. I don’t want to keep doing that forever.

I want these parts of my life to come together. My work as part of my life, not something that takes me away from it. My family as part of my everyday life, not something I have to visit. The land, the garden, the pond, my writing, my online work, my reading, my wife, my children, all in the same place.

That is what I am really trying to build.

I don’t want to spend my life

I am almost forty now, and that makes me think differently about time. I don’t know how many years I have left. Maybe twenty, maybe thirty, maybe more. Or it could be much less. Nobody knows.

But I know I don’t want to spend those years doing the same thing every day just because that is what I have been doing so far. Wake up. Go to work. Work. Come back. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.

There is nothing wrong with working. There is nothing wrong with earning money. I have responsibilities, and I will continue to carry them. But responsibility cannot be the whole of life.

I want to live with my family, work, read, write, and learn. I want to work with the land, sit with my wife, and watch my children grow. I want to be there when something happens instead of hearing about it later on the phone.

That is the life I am trying to build.

I don’t want to spend my life. I want to live it.